Programming Research Group
Technical Report TR-5-92
Safety-critical systems, formal methods and standards
Jonathan P Bowen
and Victoria Stavridou (University of London)
1992, 36pp.
Standards concerned with the development of
safety-critical systems,
and the software in such systems in particular, abound today as the
software crisis increasingly affects the world of embedded
computer-based systems. The use of
formal methods
is often advocated as a way of increasing confidence in such systems.
This paper examines the industrial use of these techniques, the
recommendations concerning formal methods in a number of current and
draft standards, and comments on the applicability and problems of
using formal methods for the development of safety-critical systems of
an industrial scale. Some possible future directions are suggested.
This paper is available as a 140,394 byte
compressed PostScript file.
Another version of this paper was published in the
IEE/BCS Software Engineering Journal, 8(4),
pp 189-209, July 1993, and was winner of the
IEE Charles Babbage Premium award, 1994.
A version of the paper also appears as a chapter in the book
Towards Verified Systems.
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