Industrial Deployment of System Engineering Methods

A formal method is not the main engine of a development process, its contribution is to improve system dependability by motivating formalisation where useful. This book summarizes the results of the DEPLOY research project on engineering methods for dependable systems through the industrial deployment of formal methods in software development. The applications considered were in automotive, aerospace, railway, and enterprise information systems, and microprocessor design.

The project introduced a formal method, Event-B, into several industrial organisations and built on the lessons learned to provide an ecosystem of better tools, documentation and support to help others to select and introduce rigorous systems engineering methods. The contributing authors report on these projects and the lessons learned. For the academic and research partners and the tool vendors, the project identified improvements required in the methods and supporting tools, while the industrial partners learned about the value of formal methods in general. A particular feature of the book is the frank assessment of the managerial and organisational challenges, the weaknesses in some current methods and supporting tools, and the ways in which they can be successfully overcome.

The book will be of value to academic researchers, systems and software engineers developing critical systems, industrial managers, policymakers, and regulators.

Prof. Alexander Romanovsky works in the School of Computing Science, Newcastle University; he has been working on system dependability and fault tolerance for many years, in particular on reasoning about faults and fault tolerance during early phases of system development, and he coordinated the related RODIN and DEPLOY projects.

Dr. Martyn Thomas in an industrialist who has been concerned with safety-critical and other high-dependence computer systems since the 1980s.