Fraunhofer IESE crafted a specialized tool for Robert Bosch GmbH that streamlines change impact analysis. This solution equips developers of critical systems with a comprehensive understanding of the dependencies affected by incoming change, enabling more effective prioritization of modifications to reduce subsequent impacts and accelerate the development process.
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What is it about:
Fraunhofer IESE supports Bosch with change impact analysis to accelerate safety engineering development cycles
The challenge:
Digitalize the safety engineering artifact change management approach
The support:
Fraunhofer IESE analyzes, understands, and digitalizes safety engineering processes
The result:
Model-based process and tool for safety engineering change management
Your benefits:
Fraunhofer IESE is your partner for safety engineering
In specific domains, such as automotive, system safety is paramount, but also costly to achieve. Particularly with systems affected by frequent changes, such as autonomous vehicles, inefficient change management leads to development resource waste and long feature update cycles. A research collaboration between Robert Bosch GmbH and Fraunhofer IESE tackled the problem of how safety engineers can be supported better in determining the change impact of new or updated vehicle features, critical failures, observed field events, or knowledge about new hazards. Fraunhofer IESE developed a model-based tool solution for interactive change impact analysis that enables engineers to efficiently identify which safety assurance elements are impacted given a proposed change in a context-sensitive manner.
The collaboration between Fraunhofer IESE and Robert Bosch GmbH yielded the following results:
IESE reviewed the existing approach used by Robert Bosch safety engineers and recognized that there was a large variety of scenarios where change impact analysis would be useful for ISO 26262 development processes. IESE then converted the example system provided by Robert Bosch into a Digital Dependability Identity (DDI). This allowed IESE to maintain an integrated digital model of the relevant system aspects and associated safety analysis artifacts, e.g., Hazard and Risk Analysis. However, the more important benefit of transitioning to DDI was that it allowed IESE engineers to extend the DDI representation of the model with a change impact traceability (meta)model. In doing so, the DDI was now ‘aware’ of how changes to specific parts of the model would impact other parts of the model. The final step in the development process was to create tool support in order to make the user interaction efficient. A web-based user interface developed using React, accessible from any modern web browser, was connected to an integrated web server and analysis backend written in Java. This choice of technologies allowed rapid prototyping and also yielded a solution with few usage requirements. Finally, IESE produced detailed documentation, which included tool usage, methodology, background research, and evaluation documentation for the tool on the example system. Throughout the duration of the project, IESE maintained regular contact with Robert Bosch project partners to align over requirements, method, and the tool prototype.
This is what Markus Schweizer, Project Manager of Central Research at Robert Bosch GmbH, says:
The collaboration between Fraunhofer IESE and Robert Bosch GmbH yielded the following results:
Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE