Safety Factories -- a Manifesto

2025-09-10

AI Summary

Modern cyber-physical system (CPS) software must continuously deliver safety-critical functionality, yet existing software factories lack deep integration of safety engineering practices, leading to a disconnect between development and safety assurance. Method: This paper introduces the “Safety Factory” paradigm—a novel approach that systematically integrates formal modeling, automated consistency verification, semantically rich safety models, and CI/CD pipelines. It enables model-based, machine-processable, and continuously evolving safety activities through automated documentation generation, formal verification, and safety-aware build pipelines. Contribution/Results: The framework ensures functional safety while significantly improving safety compliance efficiency. Empirical evaluation demonstrates its capability to support rapid iteration and concurrent safety assurance for complex CPSs, effectively bridging the gap between high-velocity development and stringent safety requirements.

Technology Category

Natural Language Processing: Safety and RobustnessConstraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo TheoriesCognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures

Application Category

Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurementsSystems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Federated Web and WoT systems, including distributed, federated and edge-based data processingUser Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User privacy protection in personalized systems

Abstract

Modern cyber-physical systems are operated by complex software that increasingly takes over safety-critical functions. Software enables rapid iterations and continuous delivery of new functionality that meets the ever-changing expectations of users. As high-speed development requires discipline, rigor, and automation, software factories are used. These entail methods and tools used for software development, such as build systems and pipelines. To keep up with the rapid evolution of software, we need to bridge the disconnect in methods and tools between software development and safety engineering today. We need to invest more in formality upfront - capturing safety work products in semantically rich models that are machine-processable, defining automatic consistency checks, and automating the generation of documentation - to benefit later. Transferring best practices from software to safety engineering is worth exploring. We advocate for safety factories, which integrate safety tooling and methods into software development pipelines.

Problem

• Integrating safety engineering into software development pipelines
• Bridging the disconnect between software and safety methods
• Automating safety documentation and consistency checks generation

Innovation

• Integrating safety tooling into development pipelines
• Using machine-processable models for safety work
• Automating consistency checks and documentation generation