Software RAMS: The Opportunity
Author(s)
Y. González-Arechavala, J. A. Rodríguez-Mondéjar
& G. Latorre-Lario
Abstract
Software is in the heart of many safety critical systems in the railway sector. The
development of systems that include software modules requires a correct
evaluation of software RAMS (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and
Safety) to get a correct value of the overall system RAMS.
In order to obtain appropriate software, the standards propose to perform a set
of activities in the different phases of software development as well as tasks to
control their correct accomplishment. They ensure the developed software is of
adequate quality. However, it is necessary to go further and try to obtain a
quantitative measure of RAMS for each software module as is usually done in
hardware development. There are several techniques for the assurance of
software reliability and safety that have been in use for years and must be
analysed to know their real potential: reliability growth models, artificial
intelligence techniques, Markov chains, Software Fault Tree Analysis and
Software Failure Mode and Effect Analysis among others.
Two circumstances emphasize the strategic time the railway sector is living
and the opportunity to adopt the most promising software techniques improve
reliability and safety: (1) The development of high-performance railway
networks that interconnect different countries and the liberalization and opening
of the national markets demand new European global agreements. In this regard,
the European Railway Agency has asked its Safety Unit to develop the new
Common Safety Methods (CSM) and Common Safety Targets (CST) to be used
in all European countries; (2) The IEC 61508-3 standard (from which some parts
of CENELEC 50128 are derived) is now under revision, with the primary aim of
ensuring the safety of the developed software by hardening the requirements and
promoting the use of the most promising techniques.
Keywords: software safety, software reliability, RAMS, railway standards.
Keywords
software safety, software reliability, RAMS, railway standards.
Related Book
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