Real-time safety-critical systems: analysis and synthesis

Real-time safety-critical systems are currently engineered in a deterministic and conservative fashion. Although successful in many application areas, this approach leads to inefficient designs that are hard to modify. The paper proposes an alternative approach to developing such systems, which gives much greater flexibility in the design process and implementation, without losing the ability to guarantee timing properties and to analyse safety properties. It is also possible to produce implementations with known timing and safety properties. The paper identifies the research issues which must be addressed in order to realise systems in this fashion