Promoting MBA in the rail sector by deriving process-related evidence via MDSafeCer

An EN 50129-compliant safety case should include process-related evidence in terms of quality as well as safety management. Potentially innovative engineering methods developed in academic settings could act as process-related evidence. However, to ease their acceptance within the rail industrial settings, the adequacy of these methods need to be justified. In this paper, we extend our previous work and we provide a broader justification including performance aspects aimed at showing that the entire MBA (Model-Based design methodology for Assessing performance and safety requirements of critical systems) is partly compliant with EN 50128. To do that, we tackle safety and performance process-related compliance as follows: we first manually check if MBA includes EN 50128-compliant process elements, then we model MBA in compliance with Software Process Engineering Meta-model 2.0, then, we derive process-based arguments from the MBA process model by using the MDSafeCer (Model Driven Safety Certification) method. By doing so, we provide a twofold contribution: we further validate MDSafeCer in the rail domain and we strengthen MBA.