Model-Based Safety Analysis
Using Modelling to Ensure System Safety
In safety-critical industries, understanding how a system can fail is as important as engineering how it should work. But traditional safety analysis methods struggle to keep pace with increasingly complex, interconnected systems — and the knowledge they generate too often disappears when engineers move on.
The risk? Safety analyses that are incomplete, disconnected from the real system, and unable to evolve as designs change — leaving hidden failure dependencies undetected.
The solution: Model-based safety analysis that integrates system understanding, failure behaviour, and mitigation strategies into a single, living digital model.
Safety Knowledge That Stays With the System.
This white paper explores how digital modelling is transforming safety analysis in complex engineering programmes — enabling better system understanding, faster design iteration, and more robust backup and mitigation strategies.
What Makes This Approach Different
Connects safety analysis directly to system architecture, not as a separate workstream
Enables failure dependency analysis across the full system — not just individual components
Accelerates design iteration by making safety impact visible in real time
Preserves institutional safety knowledge as a permanent, queryable asset
What's Inside This White Paper
Why manual, document-based safety analyses struggle with modern system complexity
The risks of safety knowledge that exists only in the heads of individual engineers
Where conventional fault tree and FMEA approaches fall short
The Modelling Landscape
From analogue physical modelling to its digital counterpart — the evolution of the discipline
The difference between causal and acausal modelling, and when each is appropriate
The technical requirements of effective physical modelling for safety-critical systems
Model-Based Safety Analysis in Practice
How digital models enable a better understanding of system failure dependencies
Integrating safety analysis into the MBSE workflow
Using models to optimise backup and mitigation strategies before design is frozen
Critical Software's Experience
How Critical Software applies modelling in safety-critical programmes
Lessons from complex, multi-domain engineering environments
Building model-based safety analysis capability within engineering organisations
Who Should Read This
Safety engineers and functional safety managers in critical industries
Systems architects applying MBSE in complex programmes
RAMS specialists responsible for reliability and availability modelling
Engineering leads evaluating modern approaches to safety assurance