Towards pattern-based reuse in safety-critical systems

Challenges such as time-to-market, reduced costs for change and maintenance have radically influenced development of today's safety-critical systems. Many domains have already adopted their system's engineering to support modular and component-based architectures. With the component-based design paradigm, the system engineering is utilized allowing to distribute development among different development teams, however, with the price that there is no full trust in independently developed parts, which makes their reuse challenging. Until now, many approaches that address reuse, on conceptual or detailed level, have been proposed. A very important aspect addressed here is to document the information flow between system parts in detail, i.e. from higher abstraction levels down to the implementation details, in order to put more trust into independently developed parts of the system.

In this paper, we describe a compact pattern system with the aim to establish a link between high level concepts for reuse and detailed description of the behavior of system parts. The main goal is to document these details up to the higher levels of abstraction in more systematic way.