Abstract
This chapter discusses software in safety-related systems. There are a large number of small firms engaged in the production of small but safety-related systems or of components or tools for systems being built by larger suppliers. While there are indeed potential safety-related problems specific to software and there are software-specific techniques that may obviate some of those problems, control of the software cannot be considered in isolation from the rest of the system and its situation in the real world. Safety is a concept that is not fixed in either time or space. At each stage of design, the specification is, in effect, transformed into a more detailed design specification. The end product is some form of build definition, in terms of software language statements and hardware and software components. Sometimes it is said that such a final specification is, in some sense, a concrete representation of the specification. Discussion of incompleteness, especially with regard to the determinability of the correctness of a system, can be clouded by confusion between different types of incompleteness.
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