09381 Extended Abstracts Collection — Refinement Based Methods for the Construction of Dependable Systems

With our growing reliance on computers, the total societal costs of their failures are hard to underestimate. Nowadays computers control critical systems from various domains such as aerospace, automotive, railway, business etc. Obviously, such systems must have a high degree of dependability -- a degree of trust that can be justifiably placed on them. Although the currently operating systems do have an acceptable level of dependability, we believe that they development process is still rather immature and ad-hoc. The constantly growing system complexity poses an increasing challenge on the system developers and requires significant improvement on the existing developing practice. To address this problem, we investigated how to establish a set of refinement-based engineering methods that can provide the designers with a systematic methodology for development of complex systems