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Industrial applications involving formal methods are still exceptions to the general rule. Lack of understanding, employees without proper education, difficulty to integrate existing development cycles, no explicit requirement from the…
For many decades, formal methods are considered to be the way forward to help the software industry to make more reliable and trustworthy software. However, despite this strong belief and many individual success stories, no real change in…
Context: The complexity of modern safety-critical systems in industries keep on increasing due to the rising number of features and functionalities. This calls for formal methods in order to entrust confidence in such systems. Nevertheless,…
Formal methods were frequently shown to be effective and, perhaps because of that, practitioners are interested in using them more often. Still, these methods are far less applied than expected, particularly, in critical domains where they…
Formal methods have been largely thought of in the context of safety-critical systems, where they have achieved major acceptance. Tens of millions of people trust their lives every day to such systems, based on formal proofs rather than…
Formal methods provide remarkable tools allowing for high levels of confidence in the correctness of developments. Their use is therefore encouraged, when not required, for the development of systems in which safety or security is…
Formal verification of software is a bit of a niche activity: it is only applied to the most safety-critical or security-critical software and it is typically only performed by specialized verification engineers. This paper considers…
Formal methods refer to rigorous, mathematical approaches to system development and have played a key role in establishing the correctness of safety-critical systems. The main building blocks of formal methods are models and specifications,…
Integrating formal methods into industrial practice is a challenging task. Often, different kinds of expertise are required within the same development. On the one hand, there are domain engineers who have specific knowledge of the system…
Safety and assurance standards often rely on the principle that requirements errors can be minimised by expressing the requirements more formally. Although numerous case studies have shown that the act of formalising previously informal…
Students often learn formal methods as part of a software engineering degree programme, without applying these formal methods outside of the specific module(s) dedicated to this subject. In particular, software engineering students often…
Context: Formal methods (FMs) have been around for a while, still being unclear how to leverage their benefits, overcome their challenges, and set new directions for their improvement towards a more successful transfer into practice.…
There is a lack of formalism for some key foundational concepts in systems engineering. One of the most recently acknowledged deficits is the inadequacy of systems engineering practices for engineering intelligent systems. In our previous…
Context: Ensuring safety for any sophisticated system is getting more complex due to the rising number of features and functionalities. This calls for formal methods to entrust confidence in such systems. Nevertheless, using formal methods…
A major determinant of the quality of software systems is the quality of their requirements, which should be both understandable and precise. Most requirements are written in natural language, good for understandability but lacking in…
Surgical procedures are often not "standardised" (i.e., defined in a unique and unambiguous way), but rather exist as implicit knowledge in the minds of the surgeon and the surgical team. This reliance extends to pre-surgery planning and…
We review state-of-the-art formal methods applied to the emerging field of the verification of machine learning systems. Formal methods can provide rigorous correctness guarantees on hardware and software systems. Thanks to the availability…
Formal methods have provided approaches for investigating software engineering fundamentals and also have high potential to improve current practices in dependability assurance. In this article, we summarise known strengths and weaknesses…
Reasoning about safety, security, and other dependability attributes of autonomous systems is a challenge that needs to be addressed before the adoption of such systems in day-to-day life. Formal methods is a class of methods that…
The safety of automated driving systems must be justified by convincing arguments and supported by compelling evidence to persuade certification agencies, regulatory entities, and the general public to allow the systems on public roads.…