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Introduction
Software safety refers to the ability of a software to execute within a system context
without causing hazards. Hazards are events that endanger life, health, property, or
environment. A software that is used in a safety critical system must undergo a safety
analysis and it should deal hazards identified by this analysis. Some domains in which
safety critical systems are used are: medical systems, avionics, vehicle control systems,
power systems, manufacturing. While a hazardous software is one that can cause hazards
or contribute to the infliction of a hazard by other components, a safe software is one that
is highly unlikely to produce an output that will cause a catastrophic event.
Safety critical operations are those that if are not performed, or are performed
incorrectly, or are performed in a different order can lead to hazardous conditions. These
operations can be divided into three categories:
1. operations that exercise direct command over hardware components
2. operations that monitor the state of hardware and provide wrong data, which can
lead to erroneous desicions of humans
3. operations that exercise direct command over hardware and in combination with
another human, environmental or hardware failure can cause a hazard
The main characteristics of a safety critical software are:
availability - is the probability of a system to be operational at a given time, t.
reliability - is the probability of a system to produce correct otputs until a given time, t.
robustness - is the ability of a computer system to deal with errors during execution.