From Safety Requirements to Simulation-driven Design of Safe Systems

System safety is an important aspect of System Dependability which should be taken in consideration during the whole system lifecycle. However, often systems are built by considering mainly their functional aspects and safety requirements are verified and validated in the latest stages of the development process. For this reason and due to the deep integration of modern systems in the daily life of people, regulatory standards have been defined and have to be applied during the development of critical systems to guarantee a minimum and acceptable level of safety. In this context, the paper proposes a model-driven process, inspired by ISO-26262, which provides a methodological support for the verification and validation of safety requirements. In particular, the proposed framework combines model-driven engineering tools and techniques with OpenModelica, an equation based simulation environment based on the Modelica language. The proposal is experimented through a case study concerning the safety analysis of an Airbag System.