SOFTWARE SAFETY.

Abstract

Summary form only given, as follows. Safety is an important property of real-time process control systems. The area of system safety is well established, and procedures exist to identify and analyze electromechanical hazards along with techniques to eliminate or limit hazards in the final system. Unfortunatley, much more is known about how to engineer safe mechanical systems than safe software systems. With the increased use of software in safety-critical components of complex systems, government certification agencies and contractors around the world are increasingly including requirements for software hazard analysis and verification of software safety (e. g. see MIL-STD-882B).