Techniques to facilitate development of safety critical software systems

Abstract

Safety critical systems must perform as desired and should never fail. The need for dependability arises from the fact that the consequences of failure are extremely high, usually a threat to human life. To build software with these features is a hard task. Formal methods and software process models have been deployed to make them safe but they are not foolproof. The paper suggests how a combination of techniques may facilitate safety critical software system development.