CakES: Cake Metaphor for Analyzing Safety Issues of Embedded Systems

Abstract

Embedded systems are used everywhere. They are complex systems whose failure may cause death or injury to people or may damage the environment are required to be safety safe. Therefore, these systems need to be analyzed. Fault tree analysis is a common way for performing safety analysis. It generates a large amount of interconnected data that itself needs to be analyzed to help different domain experts (e.g., engineers and safety analysts) in their decisions for improving the system’s safety. Additional difficulties occur for the experts in communication and in linking the data (e.g., information of basic events or minimal cut sets) to the actual parts of the system (model). Therefore, a large amount of time and effort is being spent on discussions, searching,and navigating through the data. To overcome this, we present a new metaphor called "CakES" consisting of multiple views visualizing the data generated by fault tree analysis and linking them to the actual parts of the model by intuitive interaction. Using the interaction techniques of CakES the user can directly explore the safety related data without navigating through the fault tree while retaining an overview of all critical aspects in the model.