On the requirements of high-integrity code generation

Abstract

Although formal requirements specifications can provide a complete and consistent description of a safety-critical software system, designing and developing production quality code from high-level specifications can be a time-consuming and error-prone process. Automated translation, or code generation, of the specification to production code can alleviate many of the problems associated with design and implementation. However, current approaches have been unsuitable for safety-critical environments because they employ complex and/or ad-hoc methods for translation. In this paper we discuss the issues involved in automatic code generation for high-assurance systems and define a set of requirements that code generators for this domain must satisfy. These requirements cover the formality of the translation, the quality of the code generator, and the properties of the generated code.