Software Engineering Institute

SAE Standard Aerospace Recommended Practice (ARP) 4761, Guidelines and Methods for Conducting the Safety Assessment Process on Civil Airborne Systems and Equipment, provides general guidance on evaluating the safety aspects of a design and identifies processes, methods, and tools to support the evaluation. The Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) Error Model Annex defines features to enable specification of risk mitigation methods in an architecture and assessments of system properties such as safety and reliability. This report describes how the AADL Error Model Annex supports the safety assessment processes and techniques presented in SAE Standard ARP4761. It provides a mapping between constructs of the AADL Error Model Annex and the assessment techniques identified in ARP4761 and presents examples of using the Error Model Annex with those techniques. The processes and techniques of the ARP4761 standard that this report addresses are the Functional Hazard Assessment, Preliminary System Safety Assessment, System Safety Assessment, Fault Tree Analysis, Failure Modes and Effects Analysis, Markov Analysis, and Dependence Diagrams, also referred to as Reliability Block Diagrams.