Abstract

Safety-critical systems—namely, systems on which human lives depend—have to remain functional not only in nominal conditions, that is, when everything works as expected, but also when some of their components do not behave as expected. The methodologies, activities, and techniques to tackle this engineering challenge go under the name of safety assessment. This entry is an introduction to the development of safety-critical systems with emphasis on some emerging techniques to support automated analysis and verification of complex systems.