Engineering Safety-Related Parallel Systems

: A growing number of safety--related applications are dependent on software for their control. High performance and redundancy requirements in modern control systems can be satisfied by parallel processing. This paper considers the requirements for the software engineering of safe parallel systems and the specific problems which need to be addressed: safe state analysis and temporal analysis. The benefits to be gained from utilising commercial CASE tools and extending them to facilitate the required analysis is detailed. Keywords: Parallel processing, Safety--Related computing, Software Engineering, CASE. 1. Programmable Safety Systems A growing number of control systems are adopting software to facilitate low cost, adaptive control mechanisms. Although a significant number of these systems will not be installed specifically as controls for safety, many will have safety implications if they fail [1]. Safety--critical systems, i.e. those that are considered as directly life threateni..