SAHARA -A Systematic Approach for Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment 2011-01-1003

The early phases in safety engineering (the Item Definition and the Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (H+R)) set the foundation for the overall development of safety-relevant systems. Furthermore, Hazards and their related risks affect all manufacturers in the same way. Hence, a common understanding and appraisal of Hazards should be established in a systematic way. Numerous methods and techniques for formalizations und structuring of processes and artifacts in safety critical development exist, but most of those deal with challenges arising once a hazard is defined and one is interested in its origin, or its mitigation strategy. The research and practical approaches to support the prerequisite for all the other techniques, the hazard analysis and risk assessment, is still weak. We therefore present in this paper SAHARA, a systematic approach for hazard analysis and risk assessment. The condensed information necessary from ISO DIS 26262 point of view is (1) the situation analysis, (2) hazard identification and analysis, and (3) a classification of the contributing factors exposure, severity, and controllability, which results in an ASIL assignment for each hazard. Leveraging model-based techniques, SAHARA captures relevant information in a more formal and semantically enriched way. This enables comparability, consistency, and reusability of H+Rs of different persons, different groups or even different companies, which increases the confidence, quality, and efficiency of H+Rs.