Achieving Safety and Reliability with Computer Systems

✍ Scribed by J. Y. Bromell, S. J. Sadler (auth.), B. K. Daniels (eds.)

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1987
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 305
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The safe operation of computer systems, in both their software and hardware continues to be a key issue in many real time applications, when people, environment, investment or goodwill can be at risk. Such applications include the monitoring and control of high energy processes, of nuclear and chemical plants, of factory automation, of transportation systems, or funds transfer and of communication and information systems. This book represents the proceedings of the 1987 Safety and Reliability Society Symposium held in Altrincham, UK, 11-12 November 1987. It is thus part of the series of proceedings for Society Events, which in previous years have not addressed the topic of the Safety and Reliability of Computer Systems. The book is also part of another series of reports, and is closely related to the Elsevier Book "Safety and Reliability of Programmable Electronic Systems" which I edited in 1986, and the series of workshops known as SAFECOMP held in 1979, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986 which are referenced in some of the papers. The structure of the book represents the structure of the Symposium itself. The session titles, and the papers as selected represent the current practice in many industries. The trend is towards more industrial usage of Formal Methods, and tools to support these methods, whilst continuing to make best use of Software Engineering, Safety and Reliability Assessment, and accumulated experience.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xiv
A Strategy for the Development of Safety Critical Software....Pages 1-13
Formal Support for Development of Safety Related Systems....Pages 14-28
Designing for Safety Using Ada Packages....Pages 29-43
Malpas — Verification of a Safety Critical System....Pages 44-58
Acceptance Testing....Pages 59-65
Experience in Developing and Certifying Embedded Software for Aerospace Applications....Pages 66-75
Fail-Safe Software — Some Principles and a Case Study....Pages 76-88
Verification — The Practical Problems....Pages 89-99
Stem — A Project on Software Test and Evaluation Methods....Pages 100-117
The Musa Data Revisited: Alternative Methods and Structure in Software Reliability Modelling and Analysis....Pages 118-130
Statistical Methods for Software Reliability Assessment, Past, Present and Future....Pages 131-140
The Development of Techniques for Safety and Reliability Assessment: Past, Present and Future....Pages 141-151
A Model to Support the Collection and Analysis of Software Engineering Data....Pages 152-171
The Thorp Approach to Safe Control....Pages 172-181
Highly Reliable Microcomputer Systems for Railway Control....Pages 182-188
Lessons Learned from the Failure of a Computer System Controlling a Nylon Polymer Plant....Pages 189-206
The Work of the Technical Committee on Safety, Security and Reliability of Industrial Computer Systems: European Workshop on Industrial Computer Systems....Pages 207-217
Testing of a Hardware Unit of a Nuclear Power Plant Protection System — the IEEE 796 Bus....Pages 218-231
Beyond Good Practices — A Standard for Safety Critical Software....Pages 232-241
Smart: A System Designer Support Tool to Evaluate the Performance of Complex Fault-Tolerant Systems....Pages 242-247
A Self-Checking Computer Module Based on the Viper Microprocessor — A Building Block for Reliable Systems....Pages 248-260
Availability by Replication in Embedded Distributed Systems: The Concordia Project....Pages 261-275
Another Dimension of Availability....Pages 276-284
Latent Fault Detection in Fault Tolerant Computer Based Safety and Control Systems....Pages 285-293

✦ Subjects

Mechanical Engineering;Statistics, general;Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems