On Thursday, Oct 10th, Dr Fryad Rashid, faculty member of Computer Engineering department conducted a seminar entitled AADL to Design and Validate Software Architecture of Critical Systems.
He introduced the safety problem by discussing “Safety-critical systems are those systems whose failure could result in loss of life, significant property damage, or damage to the environment”, a sentence from the American professor John Knight, and explained that his primary concern was the consequences of failure.
Dr Fryad went through some typical possible problems in some safety-critical systems by giving examples such as automotive systems, medical devices, aircraft flight controls, nuclear systems, etc. He mentioned that malfunctions in these systems could have significant consequences such as severe injuries and mission failure, and emphasized that those systems are dependent on software to the extent that they could not work without the software. So, they should be designed, verified, and validated very carefully to make sure that they obey the system specifications and requirements and are free from errors.
He extensively discussed that SEI (Software Engineering Institute) developed a description language called AADL which stands for (Architecture Analysis and Design Language) to support the early design phase of a system’s architecture with respect to its criticality.
