Developing safety-critical software within a CASE environment

One area of interest of the Parallel Processing Research Group at Sheffield is the software engineering of embedded real-time industrial control applications. Many of these applications are considered as safety-critical. Formal techniques are often cited as highly reliable for both software development methods and formally proven hardware. It is envisaged that, for the foreseeable future, such rigorous techniques will rarely be applied in the full to the majority of industrial applications. CASE can, therefore, provide a standardised framework to encourage the development of more dependable software. As it stands, are CASE packages adequate for the analysis required to determine safeness, or can they at least indicate potential unsafeness, for these applications? The authors have investigated the use of a method (D. Hatley, 1988) from which the StP CASE tools. This raises several questions with regard to safety-critical applications some of which this paper addresses