Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems: A Survey of Applications

Today, formal methods are widely recognized as an essential step in the design process of industrial safety-critical systems. In its more general definition, the term formal methods encompasses all notations having a precise mathematical semantics, together with their associated analysis methods, that allow description and reasoning about the behavior of a system in a formal manner.

Growing out of more than a decade of award-winning collaborative work within the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems: A Survey of Applications presents a number of mainstream formal methods currently used for designing industrial critical systems, with a focus on model checking. The purpose of the book is threefold: to reduce the effort required to learn formal methods, which has been a major drawback for their industrial dissemination; to help designers to adopt the formal methods which are most appropriate for their systems; and to offer a panel of state-of-the-art techniques and tools for analyzing critical systems.

STEFANIA GNESI is Director of Research and head of the Formal Methods and Tools Laboratory at ISTI-CNR (Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione-Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche) in Pisa, Italy. She was previously a lecturer in methods and tools for the specification and analysis of software systems at the University of Florence.

TIZIANA MARGARIA is Full Professor in the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the University of Potsdam, where she holds the Chair of Service and Software Engineering at the Institute of Informatics. She has held positions at universities in Göttingen, Dortmund, and Passau, Germany, as well as in Sweden and Italy.