Technology and Assessment of Safety-Critical Systems

This volume contains the proceedings of the 2nd Annual Symposium of the Safety-Critical Systems Club (held in Birmingham, February 1994), which examined the various aspects of technology currently employed in the design of safety-critical systems, and emphasized the importance of safety assessment and risk management in their design and operation. The authors discussed human factors, a subject whose importance in the technology field is growing, and programmable logic controllers (PLCS), which are increasingly being employed in safety-critical applications. There were also papers on maintainability, ADA, reverse engineering, social issues, formal methods, medical systems and the "new" technologies, including neural networks and knowledge-based systems. Papers on the important fields of safety assessment and management are balanced by papers on risk management and its economics.