Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems: A Survey of Applications

Making the formal methods commonly used to test complex, safety-critical control systems easier to learn and integrate into the industries where they can do the most good

Formal methods are an essential step in the design process for industrial safety-critical systems. The term "formal methods" encompasses all notations having precise mathematical semantics, together with their associated analysis methods, that allow description and reasoning about the behavior of a system in a formal manner.

Based on more than a decade of award-winning collaborative work within the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems presents mainstream formal methods currently used for designing industrial critical systems, focusing on model checking. Its tri-fold purpose is to reduce the effort required to learn formal methods, to help designers to adopt the formal methods most appropriate for their systems, and to offer a panel of state-of-the-art techniques and tools for analyzing critical systems.

This powerful resource:

• Balances leading-edge material, established practice, and reviews of historically important contributions
• Collects timely, current articles written by a truly international group of authors
• Describes case studies from many kinds of high-integrity systems development
• Emphasizes model checking, an important step in several types of formal methods

Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems is an ideal guide for students in advanced-undergraduate computer science courses and an excellent reference for industry professionals.