Using Behavior Trees in Risk Assessment

Paper in proceeding, 2025

Cyber-physical production systems increasingly involve collaborative robotic missions, which come with a higher demand for robustness and safety. Practitioners rely on risk assessments to identify potential failures and implement measures to mitigate their risks. Ensuring that mitigation strategies derived from risk assessments are adequately considered in the software implementation can be challenging, especially when stakeholders involved in the assessment process lack a programming background. This leads to a disconnection between the outputs of risk assessments and the actual implementation of robotic missions. To address this issue, there is a need to integrate software engineering practices into the risk assessment process to ensure consistency and traceability between the outputs of risk assessments and their corresponding software implementation.This paper presents a design science study that conceived a model-based approach for early risk assessment in a development-centric way. Our approach supports risk assessment activities by using behavior-tree models. We evaluated the approach together with five practitioners from four companies. This approach is the first attempt to use behavior-tree models to support risk assessment. Our findings highlight the potential of behavior-tree models in supporting early identification, visualization, and bridging the gap between code implementation and the outputs of risk assessments. Our findings suggest research directions for further development of the approach to increase its applicability and usefulness in practice.