Formal methods in safety-critical standards

There is great interest in ensuring correctness of safety-critical embedded systems since on the one hand the use of software gives greatly increased functionality and flexibility and on the other hand it provides unprecedented possibilities for errors. Formal methods are one technique that could improve the situation. Their use is now being suggested by an increasing number of standards in the safety-critical area. The paper compares the recommendations given by a number of important existing and emerging standards and tries to identify future trends in this area. A bibliography of standards and related publications is included