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Model-based software development and automatic production code generation have become increasingly established in recent years. The aerospace industry and other industries, such as automotive, have widely adopted and successfully deployed these methods in many different series production programs worldwide. This brought various benefits, such as a reduction in development times and improved quality due to more precise specifications, and early verification and validation by means of simulation. Model-based development is a general purpose development approach which can be applied to a wide variety of applications. Safety-critical systems, like found in aerospace applications to a large extent, but also found increasingly more often in other industries, like automotive or medical devices, pose special additional requirements to this process. This paper describes how model-based design and automatic production code generation can be applied to the development of safety-critical software.

Model-based software development is increasingly being used to develop software for electronic control units (ECUs). When developing safety-related software, compared to non-safety-related software development, additional requirements specified by relevant safety-standards have to be met. Meeting these requirements should also be considered to be best practices for non-safety-related software. This paper introduces a model-based reference workflow for the development of safety-related software conforming to relevant safety-standards such as IEC 61508 and ISO 26262. The reference workflow discusses requirements traceability aspects, software architecture considerations that help to support modular development and ease the verification of model parts and the code generated from those model parts, and the selection and enforcement of modeling and coding guidelines.