Bylands: reverse engineering safety-critical systems

We address two problems concerned with the maintenance of safety-critical software. Firstly, we analyse the new issues required for the reverse engineering of real-time existing code to extract high level designs. Secondly, we present a possible design abstraction mechanism that can be used for safety-critical software. We use formal transformations both in the reverse engineering of systems involving temporal constraints, and in the definition of the abstract representation. We present a design framework and the results of initial experiments. The contributions are: (1) the requirements analyses for reverse engineering safety-critical systems, (2) the use of very-high-level domain languages, and (3) formal transformations as the unifying technology.