Causality as a means for the expression of requirements for safety critical systems

Abstract

The development of requirements for software systems has long been identified as an important and difficult part of software development. This is much more so for safety-critical systems. In this paper we identify one approach which we believe, forces the developer to concentrate upon requirements rather than initial design concepts (as often happens). This approach uses causality as its main abstraction, primarily because causality is intrinsic to many systems, and is intuitive to developers.<>