Language Issues in Hazard Detection Using Queries

Safety-critical systems are pervading all areas of our lives. Accompanying the growth is an increasing level of awareness of the potential dangers involved. As a result, there has been recent realization among researchers that it is important to consider entire systems and their safety characteristics, going beyond individual embedded or real-time system components. This new focus presents an opportunity for a new approach to software safety, one that can accommodateheterogeneous distributed systems that may contain COTS components and may consist of components not all of which were designed to be used in safety-critical settings. In response to this need, we have developed a software hazard detection tool that we argue increases the safety level of continuous safety critical systems. In this paper we discuss the tool's language and code generation. The appendix contains the language syntax and a full sample of the generated code