V-Models: LLMS for the Development Lifecycle of Safety-Critical Systems
Functional Safety system (software & hardware) development is typically a V-Model process, which is governed by strenuous regulations & norms. This, along with use case specificity, and the scrupulous nature of functional safety creates various bottlenecks across the V-Model, i.e., redundant aspects of functional safety system development. To alleviate these bottlenecks, we introduce two LLM assistants designed to support key V-Model phases. The first assistant, the Digital Safety Assistant (DSA), provides safety engineers with general knowledge of functional safety norms through Retrieval Augmented Generation, thus decreasing norm and application domain adaptation overhead. We benchmark various models and assess the DSA using an official functional safety Certification exam, where the DSA achieves up to 70%, surpassing typical performance levels. A second assistant, the Automated Testing Assistant, developed through Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning to support the V-Model verification phase, is capable of correctly generating and debugging PLC test code with 93% correctness.