The Safety-Critical Systems Lectures Series

Contributions by

Jan Peleska
and others who will be listed here later.

Context of this Lectures Series

This is a series of lectures and seminars of our initiative Graduate Studies in Safety-Critical Systems. It is intended for an international audience of engineers working in the field, graduate students working on their Diploma, Masters, PhD of Habilitation degrees in computer science or electrical engineering. Due to the international character of the initiative, lectures will be held in English. At present, the lecture series is divided into four parts, each part planned as a two hours/week lecture for one semester:

• Safety-Critical Systems 1:
  Basic concepts - problems - methods - techniques (this term)
• Safety-Critical Systems 2:
  Management aspects - standards - V-Models - TQM - assessment - process improvement (in SoSe01 term)
• Safety-Critical Systems 3:
  Formal methods and tools - model checking - testing - partial verification - inspection techniques - case studies (last term)
• Safety-Critical Systems 4: Engineering of Embedded Software Systems
  (new, in WS02/03 term)

Objectives of the Safety-Critical Systems 1 Lecture

This lecture provides an introduction into some characteristic safety-related requirements to be encountered when developing safety-critical (embedded) systems. We describe methods that are considered as state-of-the-art or as promising research fields for hazard anlysis, specification, design, verification, validation and test. Examples are provided from the fields of avionics, railway control and medical systems. While it is not intended to study a specific method in detail (this will be performed in Safety-Critical Systems 3) we wish to give a comprehensive overview about requirements, methods and techniques that we consider as crucial capabilities for engineers and computer scientists involved in the development of safety-critical computer-based systems.

Tutorial Slides for this Lecture

Exercises

Series 1 as Postscript File with Java source code
TrainSim.java (main method of the simulation program), RailwayNetwork.java (auxiliary class with global constants), Segment.java (Class specifying track segment properties), Train.java (Class specifying train-related properties and behaviour), Point.java (Class specifying point-related properties and behaviour).
To be completed until Friday, 17MAY2002 (Exercise 1 and 2) and Friday, 24MAY2002 (Exercise 3)

Series 2 as Postscript File

References

• N. Storey: Safety-Critical Computer Systems. Addison Wesley Longman 1996.
• M. R. Lyu: Software Reliability Engineering. McGraw-Hill 1995.

Related Activities of Other Groups and Organisations

• Safety-Critical Systems Club
• IEEE SESC Safety Study Group
• Lectures of University of York GB (MSc courses in Safety Critical Systems Engineering and Software Engineering)