In what sectors or themes have customers been advocating or demanding the application of formal methods in their projects?

Main -> FAQ -> ExFAQ-HM-3


 * Theme: External Factor Pushing for Formal Method Adoption (ExFac)
 * Role: HM

Answer
Customers are rather conservative with respect to the development processes and also generally not aware of the potential benefit of new methods and tools. The difficulty is then often to find a first customer (early adopter) with an adequate project were he can be convinced by a good balance of arguments related to risk control and ROI.

Transportation
The METEOR project, who was the first one to deploy the B method at an industrial scale was driven by the client. The client was RATP (Parisian underground). After the success of this project, they now systematically ask for this formal method.

Some customers are reluctant to use formal methods, because it deeply changes the development process. This is especially sensitive by some clients of Siemens, which have experience in the development of safety critical systems. The general culture in safety is not to change anything if it proved to be working; hence it is normal to expect some resistance in these sectors. For such customers, good reference in conducting similar projects is very important.

Aeropace industry
NASA has been investing a lot in formal methods for the last decade, initially on code analysis. Consider for instance the development of Java Path Finder and C Global Surveyor.

ESA is not willing to invest as well in these approaches. However after the failure of the Ariane 5 Flight 501, the use of automated analysis was the first example of large-scale static code analysis by abstract interpretation. Nowadays the use of source code analysis of that kind (such as Astree and Polyspace) is widespread in the space and aeronautic industry. For example Airbus now systematically requires the use of Astree.