Preface of the special issue on formal methods in industrial critical systems

Abstract

The use of formal methods in industrial critical systems has a lot of potential to increase the quality and reliability of these systems. Three of the main challenges of the application of formal methods in industrial systems are scalability, their often inherent complexity and the integration into existing development processes. Due to this, their application is limited mainly to where usage is highly recommended by domain-specific standards, e.g., in light rail and avionics. The contributions in this special issue address some of these core problems of using formal methods in industry. The articles are based on papers selected from the 2015 Fmics workshop, an annual forum organized by the Ercim working group dedicated to formal methods for industrial critical systems.