Data-Centric Lifecycle Integrity Validation for IEC 61508 Using Executable Documentation

Abstract

: Industrial cyber-physical systems rely on structured safety lifecycle in which hazards, risks, requirements, architecture, and verification activities are related across defined phases. In practice, these elements are distributed across heterogeneous documents, making structural consistency and traceability difficult to maintain. This paper presents an approach in which lifecycle elements are encoded as structured documentation artifacts with explicit types and relations. From a data-centric perspective, these artifacts are treated as structured data objects whose relations form a constrained graph representation of lifecycle information. A controlled vocabulary and constrained relations define a consistent representation of lifecycle data. The artifacts are processed through a documentation build workflow that acts as a deterministic data processing and validation pipeline, automatically generating traceability views and completeness checks. Structural constraints over artifact relations cover verification, evidence linkage, SIL allocation, and hazard coverage. The approach is demonstrated on a reproducible IEC 61508 SIL 2 Emergency Stop example, with an open demo site and repository that provide all sources and build scripts. Violations introduced by removing required relations are detected as non-empty coverage tables. The results show that lifecycle integrity can be evaluated as a structural property of the artifact graph, enabling early, machine-checkable detection of missing relations.