Towards the integration of safety analysis in a model-based system engineering approach with SysML

Mechatronic systems are complex systems involving knowledge from various disciplines such as computer science, mechanics, electronics and control. Model-based system engineering is an efficient approach to cope with the increasing system complexity. It covers specifying, designing, simulating and validating systems and is very useful for the design of complex systems since it helps better manage the complexity while enhancing consistency and coherence. This approach allows errors to be detected as soon as possible in the design process, and thus reduces the overall cost of the product. Integrating safety concerns from early design stages, within the MBSE approach helps the designer to consider safety aspect during system architecture synthesis and reduce the number of iterations and design changes. This paper presents a step towards the integration of safety within the MBSE approach. SysML is chosen as a modeling language because it offers unified communication semantics to the multidisciplinary collaborating team involved in the design of complex systems. A case study illustrates the proposed approach. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.