At the Embedded Systems Quality Assurance department (ESQ) of Fraunhofer IESE, tool development in the area of safety engineering is now being carried out over an extended period of time. The roots of this go back well over 15 years through Prof. Liggesmeyer, when tool support for fault tree analysis was initially developed under the name “Safety and Reliability Analysis Tool UWG”. About five years later, a collaboration with Siemens yielded another step in the tool’s evolution, this time called Embedded Systems Safety and Reliability Analyzer (ESSaRel). Both UWG and ESSaRel were standalone tools that allowed the definition and analysis of safety models. In order to foster the integration with architecture design models (UML/SysML) years later, a new development effort was started, with the aim of extending existing modeling tools like Magic Draw with fault tree analysis.
In 2013, a development endeavor started with the objective of enriching the general-purpose system engineering tool Enterprise Architect with safety engineering capabilities as well. The initial label for this development branch was I-SafE, and it laid the technical foundation for safeTbox as we know it today. The supported techniques and features were successively extended in newer implementations through a large number of projects until a comprehensive tool suite was developed, which combines the essential techniques of safety engineering with basic systems engineering techniques.
For more than a year now, increasing emphasis has been placed on professionalizing the existing implementation by consolidating and revising the code base. The result of this work is safeTbox®, which today represents the most usable and stable tool the department ever had. In general, we saw and see a significant need for model-based systems and safety engineering in industry, which ultimately motivated the development of appropriate tool solutions in order to make engineers more effective and efficient in their daily work. We have achieved this thanks to a well-trained and experienced student development team under the direction of Santiago Velasco and Jan Reich.
Development leaders
Santiago Velasco, M.Sc. Computer Science, TU Kaiserslautern
Participated in the development of ESSaRel, the MD and EA versions. Joined the ESQ department of Fraunhofer IESE in October 2011.
Working as a developer since 2008. Good experience with functional safety, software development planning and management.
Jan Reich, M. Sc. Computer Science in Automotive Systems, TU Kaiserslautern
Involved in the development of the EA version since 2013. Joined the ESQ department of Fraunhofer IESE as a full-time researcher in February 2017.
Pursuing PhD in the area of safety assurance for collaborative embedded systems. Deep knowledge about EA’s extension mechanisms as well as the
technical responsibility for the software architecture of safeTbox.
Developers
Tewanima Löwe, Master student at TU Kaiserslautern
Participated in the development of the MD and EA versions. Developer since August 2012.
Good experience in software architectures.
Joshua Frey, Master student at Hochschule Worms
safeTbox developer since January 2017. Good experience in testing, clean code, and agile development.
ElanaYanakieva, Bachelor student at TU Kaiserslautern.
safeTbox developer since January 2017.
Pramod Hedge, Master student at TU Kaiserslautern.
safeTbox developer since June 2017.
As a team we are capable of developing, adapting, and integrating our tool solution according to a company’s methods and processes. In addition, we have experience in realizing new tool solutions on the basis of well-known modeling tools such as Enterprise Architect or Magic Draw.