A Survey of Static Formal Methods for Building Dependable Industrial Automation Systems
It addresses the need for reliable, safe, and secure systems in industrial automation, but is incremental as it synthesizes existing approaches.
This survey tackles the problem of building dependable industrial automation systems by reviewing static formal methods across the system development life cycle, identifying research gaps and future directions.
Industrial automation systems (IAS) need to be highly dependable; they should not merely function as expected but also do so in a reliable, safe, and secure manner. Formal methods are mathematical techniques that can greatly aid in developing dependable systems and can be used across all phases of the system development life cycle (SDLC), including requirements engineering, system design and implementation, verification and validation (testing), maintenance, and even documentation. This state-of-the-art survey reports existing formal approaches for creating more dependable IAS, focusing on static formal methods that are used before a system is completely implemented. We categorize surveyed works based on the phases of the SDLC, allowing us to identify research gaps and promising future directions for each phase.