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ISO 26262 aims at providing guidelines to the automotive industry and its suppliers for managing functional safety in the early phases of the development of safety-critical automotive E/E systems. One of the recommendations of ISO 26262 is the identification of potential failures, their causes and possible effects. One of the most frequently employed means for performing this task is the conduction of Failure Mode and Effect Analysis - FMEA. Despite the widespread adoption of FMEA, our industrial experience has shown that a considerable number of software components are not considered in the analysis. As a result, the components not considered in the analysis might cause safety-critical consequences if they fail. To overcome this challenge, guidelines have been created to support safety engineers throughout FMEA activities, with the aim of ensuring proper consideration of all safety-critical components of the software architecture.

Evidence has shown that the lack of traceability between safety requirements and both architecture and failure propagation models is a key reason for the incompleteness and inconsistency of safety requirements, and, consequently, a root cause of safety incidents. In this regard, this paper presents checks for the automatic detection of incompleteness and inconsistency of safety requirements with respect to failure propagation models and architecture. First, the notion of safety requirements completeness and consistency was decomposed into small manageable pieces called Safety Requirement Completeness and Consistency Criteria. Breaking the complex notions of completeness and consistency into finer grains was important to allow systematic and precise elaboration of the completeness and consistency checks.