The AltaRica 3.0 Project for Model-Based Safety Assessment

The aim of this article is to present the AltaRica 3.0 project. “Traditional” risk modeling formalisms (e.g. Fault Trees, Markov Processes, etc.) are well mastered by safety analysts. Efficient assessment algorithms and tools are available. However, models designed with these formalisms are far from the specifications of the systems under study. They are consequently hard to design and to maintain throughout the life cycle of systems. The high-level modeling language AltaRica has been created to tackle this problem.The objective of the AltaRica 3.0 project is to design a new version of AltaRica and to develop a complete set of authoring and assessment tools for this new version of the language. AltaRica 3.0 improves significantly the expressive power of AltaRica Data-Flow without decreasing the efficiency of assessment algorithms. Prototypes of a compiler to Fault Trees, a compiler to Markov chains, stochastic and stepwise simulators have been already developed. Other tools are under specification or implementation.