The rapid growth of complexity and scale can be witnessed in the design and development of modern systems. As such, the severity of damages in the occasional accidents has attracted great deal of attention lately. Although a variety of methods have so far been studied to overcome or reduce the disastrous results of hazards, the issues seem still persistent and even complicated due to the situation mentioned above. The concept of functional safety has been regarded as one approach to handling the matters by shifting up to the functions level from the consideration of each physical component itself. The outcomes of those efforts would be the international standards on functional safety such as IEC 61508 and its relatives including IEC 62278, EN 50128, ISO26262, and so on. In this paper, a method of how hazards can be analyzed to be coped with those standards has been studied. In the method proposed, the systems modeling language (SysML) is playing a key role to model and analyze the hazards from the viewpoint of functional safety. The approach taken has been applied in the analysis of the hazards in railroad systems. In spite of focusing on the individual components hazards, the method based on functional safety has analyzed them collectively with the added effect of identifying the cause originated from the interface between the functions.

The recent trend in modern systems development can be characterized by the increasing complexity in terms of both the functionality and HW/SW scale that seems to be accelerated by the growing user requirements and the rapid advancement of technology. Among the issues of complexity, the one related to systems safety has attracted great deal of attention lately in the development of the products ranging from mass-transportation systems to defence weapon systems. As such, the incorporation of safety requirements in systems development is becoming more important. Note, however, that since such safety-critical systems are usually complex to develop, a lot of organizations and thus, engineers should participate in the development. In general, there seems to be a variety of differences in both the breadth and depth of the technical background they own. To address the problems, at first this paper presents an effective design process for safety-critical systems, which is intended to meet both the systems design and safety requirements. The result is then advanced to obtain the models utilizing the systems modeling language (SysML) that is a de facto industry standard. The use of SysML can facilitate the construction of the integrated process and also foster active communication among many participants of diverse technical backgrounds. As a case study, the model-based development of high-speed trains is discussed.