Traditionally, promoted by the internet companies, DevOps is more and more appealing to industries which develop systems with safety-critical functions. Since safety-critical systems must meet regulatory requirements and require specific safety assurance processes in addition to the normal development steps, enabling continuous delivery of software in safety-critical systems requires the automation of the safety assurance process in the delivery pipeline. In this technical briefing, we describe relevant challenges to speed-up the development of safety-critical software-intensive systems from an industrial point of view. Moreover, we outline how to integrate software/system engineering and safety assurance life-cycle into a so-called DevCertOps concept realizing continuous safety assurance safety-critical systems using MBSE and model-based safety assurance concepts.

Marc Zeller works as a Senior Key Expert for model-based safety and reliability engineering at Siemens Technology in Munich. His research interests are focused on the efficient and effective development of dependability-relevant Cyber-physical Systems as well as the assurance trustworthness of AI-based systems using model-based engineering techniques. Moreover, he is co-lead of the Siemens wide research program “Engineering and Validation of Intelligent Systems”. Marc Zeller received a diploma in Computer Science from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in 2007 and obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Augsburg in 2013. With over 10-years’ experience in different industrial domains, such as automotive, railway, avionics, or industry automations, he has been involved in various indutrial projects establishing model-based engineering techniques and is author of over 70 international publications in this area.