A new approach for developing safety-critical software in automotive industry

E/E systems have been widely used in safety-critical scenarios in the modern world. The system is composed of a variety of software components in an automobile now, but most of the software vendors only apply the common software process method to construct the software modules. How to avoid the irrational and ambiguous requirements has not been addressed and there is no efficient way to guarantee the correctness of the software components. In this paper, we report a new approach for developing a safety-critical software system. We show how this problem is attacked by adding or improving two software development phases on the traditional software process. Formal specification and verification techniques are employed to establish the new software development methodology. Our new approach has been applied on the verification of an OSEK/VDX standard based real-time OS and the result is encouraging.