Approach to software safety analysis in a distributed real-time system.

A software-safety analysis approach for distributed systems, based on a technique called component-message fault analysis, is presented. This technique checks the safety-critical logic, using the safety specification for different categories of component fault events, to uncover ambiguous safety requirements or design deficiencies. To demonstrate the power of this technique, a dual-purpose missile system is introduced and analyzed with regard to its software-safety requirements.