Teaching and Training Formal Methods for Safety Critical Systems

Embedded systems become a major part in many domains. This also involves systems which might create heavy damages and injuries when they fail. However, because of the rising number of software components used within this embedded hardware, safety-related problems are hard to discover, and it is even harder to prove that there are none. One approach to guarantee the correctness of a system is model-based safety analysis. They rely on an abstract representation of the system which can then be analyzed using model checkers. The results of these analysis are in general much more precise and often reveal surprising results of failure combinations, where no one had ever thought about before. Nevertheless model-based safety analysis is not used widely. Mainly because it is not well-known and hard to apply to current safety standards which rely on manual approaches. Another fact might be, that most approaches are scientific and in most cases prototypes that are hard to use. In this paper we present some ideas and first steps towards an easy to learn and easy to use model based safety approach. Additionally we present different user-interfaces that are supposed to support the user in his learning.