Technology and Assessment of Safety-Critical Systems

This is the proceedings of the second annual symposium of the Safety-critical Systems Club (The Belfry, Birmingham, UK, 8-10 February 1994), which examined the various aspects of technology currently employed in the design of safety-critical systems, and emphasized the importance of safety assessment and risk management in their design and operation. The authors discuss human factors, a subject whose importance in the technology field is growing, and programmable logic controllers (PLCs) which are increasingly being employed in safety-critical applications. There are also papers on maintainability, Ada, reverse engineering, social issues, formal methods, medical systems, and on the "new" technologies, including neural networks and knowledge-based systems, all in the context of safety. Papers on the crucially important field of safety assessment and on safety management are balanced by papers on risk management and its economics. There is an even balance of contributions from academia and industry. Thus, industry is given the opportunity to express its views of the safety-critical domain and, at the same time, is offered a glimpse of the technologies which are currently under development and which, if successful, will be available in the medium-term future.