code. However, such future approaches building on
the profile have not been introduced up to now.
The issue of software-based memory protection
has been the subject of several publications, e.g.,
(Borchert et al., 2013; K. Pattabiraman and Zorn,
2008; Chen et al., 2001; Subasi et al., 2016). None
of these approaches enables the modeling of safety
features in a UML model nor the automatic genera-
tion of these safety model elements into safety-aware
source code.
In summary, in contrast to existing work our ap-
proach provides the following innovative contribu-
tions:
1. Language support to specify safety requirements
(and, thus, influence the resulting overhead) for
each individual variable directly in the developer
model (UML).
2. An exemplary UML profile to express safety re-
quirements for individual variables in compliance
with the safety standard IEC 61508.
3. An MDD transformation approach to turn safety
specifications into action during the system’s run-
time (e.g., checking the validity of values stored
in variables during runtime).
6 CONCLUSION
In this paper we take a step to bring the safety stan-
dard IEC 61508 into practice. For that, we propose
an extension of UML to specify protection for safety-
critical attributes. The novel model elements enable
the developer to specify memory protection require-
ments and techniques on the model level using stereo-
types with tagged values. To turn the specification
into productive design elements, we have presented
an MDD workflow that enables the generation of low
level source code from the specified safety properties.
While this paper focuses on the model represen-
tation and an MDD workflow for safety-protected at-
tributes, future work may be in designing an efficient
software architecture at the source code level together
with further evaluation concerning the trade-off be-
tween runtime and safety. Furthermore, this paper has
introduced model representations and transformations
for only a small subset of the safety techniques rec-
ommended by IEC 61508. Future work may embed
other safety techniques in the MDD process, such as
recovery mechanisms, for instance.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was partially funded by the German Fed-
eral Ministry of Economics and Technology (Bun-
desministeriums fuer Wirtschaft und Technologie-
BMWi) within the project “Holistic model-driven de-
velopment for embedded systems in consideration of
diverse hardware architectures” (HolMES). The au-
thors are responsible for the contents of this publica-
tion.
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