A Survey of Formal Specification Application to Safety Critical Systems

Abstract

Safety critical systems are systems where a failure to find a fault can cause serious harm to the environment and people or even can lead to loss of life. The most important requirement of the system is to keep it fault free. This will be possible if the system is subject to development and verification in a systematic approach. Formal specification methods, as the name suggests, are truly formal with a strong mathematical background that can be trusted to facilitate the development of fault-free systems. The paper will discuss examples of safety-critical systems and some common type of errors that are found in the development of such systems will be discussed. The paper will examine how different domains affect the standards of formal specification methods in different applications. The approach will be to survey various papers in the related fields.