  The importance of mission or safety critical software systems in many
application domains of embedded systems is continuously growing, and so is the
effort and complexity for reliability and safety analysis. Model driven
development is currently one of the key approaches to cope with increasing
development complexity, in general. Applying similar concepts to reliability,
availability, maintainability and safety (RAMS) analysis activities is a
promising approach to extend the advantages of model driven development to
safety engineering activities aiming at a reduction of development costs, a
higher product quality and a shorter time-to-market. Nevertheless, many
model-based safety or reliability engineering approaches aim at reducing the
analysis complexity but applications or case studies are rare. Therefore we
present here a large scale industrial case study which shows the benefits of
the application of component fault trees when it comes to complex safety
mechanisms. We compare the methodology of component fault trees against classic
fault trees and summarize benefits and drawbacks of both modeling
methodologies.

Software Engineering