Working Group on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems
by Stefania Gnesi and Diego Latella
Formal Methods
has been advocated as a means of increasing the reliability of systems,
especially those which are safety or business critical, but the industrial
uptake of such methods has been slow. This is due to the perceived difficulty
of a mathematical nature of these methods, the lack of tool support, and
the unavailability of precedents where formal methods have been proven
to be effective. It is even more difficult to develop automatic specification
and verification tools due to limitations like state explosion, undecidability,
etc. This working group was created to bring together researchers mainly,
but not exclusively, from the ERCIM consortium in order to promote the
use of formal methods within industry.
Since the inception of the working group in 1996, two workshops were
organized to exchange experience in the industrial usage of formal methods
and to promote research and development for the improvement of formal methods
and tools with respect to their usage in industry. The first was held
at St. Hugh's College in Oxford in March 1996 (see ERCIM News 26, page
46), a selection of the papers presented at this meeting will be published
in a special issue of the International Journal on Formal Methods for Systems
Design (Kluwer). The second took place at the University of Cesena, 4-5
July 1997.
Second ERCIM International Workshop and Meeting on Formal Methods for
Industrial Critical Systems
This workshop was organized as a satellite meeting of the 24th International
Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming ICALP 97. Approximately
25 people attended the workshop, which was chaired by Stefania Gnesi of
IEI-CNR, Italy. There were four invited speakers:
- Pim Kars Utopics BV: Formal Methods in the Design of a Storm
Surge Barrier Control System
- Ulrich Herzog Univ. of Erlangen-Nürnberg: Stochastic Process
Algebras for Qualitative Assurance
- Raffaele Mazzeo - SASIB Railways S.p.A.: Vital Processor Interlocking:
A Case Study of Utilisation of Formal Methods for all the Design Phases
- Giorigio Mongardi ANSALDO-Trasporti: Formal Methods for Raylway Signalling
Applications: rationale and case studies.
Please contact:
Stefania Gnesi - IEI-CNR
Tel: +39 50 593489
E-mail: gnesi@iei.pi.cnr.it
Diego Latella - CNUCE-CNR
Tel: +39 50 593230
E-mail: latella@cnuce.cnr.it
