The Landscape of Integration and Automation for STPA in Aerospace: A Systematic Review

As aerospace systems grow in complexity, traditional safety analysis methods are proving insufficient, leading to the adoption of systemic approaches like System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA). However, its practical application is often diminished by its cognitively demanding nature, with a significant portion of published analyses being incomplete and lacking independent validation. While prior reviews have mapped STPA’s applications, a dedicated analysis of its integration and automation within the aerospace safety engineering lifecycle has been absent. This paper fills that gap, presenting a systematic literature review of 126 studies to assess the state of the art. This analysis reveals a clear bifurcation in the literature: model-based approaches are well positioned to integrate STPA into the entire engineering workflow, using its outputs to inform subsequent design and verification stages. In contrast, non-model-based applications tend to treat STPA as an isolated, standalone analysis, limiting its impact. Despite the strong trend towards Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), our review identifies several critical research gaps that persist. There is a widespread absence of substantive validation for analytical outputs, limited attention given to methods for filtering and managing the “scenario overload” problem, and a preference for MBSE over the more specialized Model-Based Safety Analysis (MBSA) frameworks. These findings suggest that while the automation of STPA is advancing, its full potential will only be unlocked by addressing these challenges of integration, validation, and scalability.