ESTEREL: a formal method applied to avionic software development

Dassault Aviation is a French aircraft manufacturer building civil business jets (the Falcon family) and military jet fighters (the Mirage and Rafale families). It has been concerned with formal methods inside the development process of avionic software since 1989. In this paper, we give a comprehensive account of three industrial-size studies carried out at Dassault Aviation using the reactive synchronous language ESTEREL and its toolset, in collaboration with the public research team that develops ESTEREL at Ecole des Mines de Paris and INRIA Sophia-Antipolis. We deal with software engineering issues related to compilation, optimization and verification of safety-critical embedded software. The goal is to ensure production of efficient and reliable code.