College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

• Risky change

  New NSF grant allows software engineer Robyn Lutz to investigate the safety analysis of evolving product lines.

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  Change is inevitable.
  
  But change can also be risky - very risky when the change occurs in safety-critical systems.
  
  "Changing a product line of safety-critical systems can be sometimes be even riskier," says Robyn Lutz, professor of computer science. "But since change is inevitable, we should seek better ways, such as analysis techniques and software tools, to reduce the associated risks."
  
  Lutz, who as a software engineer has studied product safety as it relates to computer technology, has recently received a three-year, $300,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to continue to look at the safety analysis of evolving product lines.
  
  When change occurs in a product line, the safety consequences can be even greater because multiple systems are involved.
  
  An example of such a change is a pacemaker/defibrillator. The software in past pacemakers couldn't tell when the individual was resting or exercising. New versions of the product have added a "rate-responsive" software feature to distinguish whether or not the user is currently active and to use this additional information in determining whether or not to stimulate the heart.
  
  Sounds good, right?
  
  "The capability to do this did not exist and had not been anticipated when the product line was initially built," Lutz says. "But it had significant safety implications when added as an optional feature to the product line later on.
  
  "However a business can't sit still and not improve their product," she continued. "They have to add more features to keep their share of the market. We're trying to figure out how best to we keep that product evolution safe (for the consumer)."
  
  Lutz's research is investigating types of evolution that are both common and problematic in safety-critical product lines while extending safety analysis techniques to efficiently update the product-line safety analysis as the software evolves.
  
  Her research team is also developing automated tool support.
  
  "The number of safety-critical product lines on the market is expanding rapidly," Lutz said. "We need better analysis techniques to determine whether a new feature can be added to all the systems in the product line safely."
  
  Some other of these product lines include aircraft flight-instrumentation displays, communication satellites, medical-imaging systems, smart vehicles and assistive robots.
  
  Lutz's area of research is software engineering, the part of computer science that studies how to develop better software systems. Safety-critical software is the software that can cause, or that can prevent, a hazardous situation or loss of a project.
  
  "I investigate methods by which we can more accurately describe and more rigorously analyze the requirements and design for safety-critical software and build tools to help developers apply these methods," she said.
  
  By developing these tools, Lutz hopes these safety-critical issues can be found earlier in the product development.
  
  "What I would like to do is provide software tools and techniques that allow companies building high integrity product lines to use these tools efficiently and cost effectively to check to see if the changes they are making are good changes," she said.
  
  "If we find these safety concerns earlier in the product development, it will save a lot of money. If we on't find these concerns until the product is being tested, it is much more expensive to fix.".

Robyn Lutz

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