Industrial Deployment of Formal Methods: Trends and Challenges

The DEPLOY project has provided a rare opportunity to explore and document the potential benefits and challenges in creating and exploiting usable formal methods. Using the results of an updated review of 98 industrial applications, we identify trends relating to analytic power, robustness, stability and usability of tools, as well as the quality of evidence on costs and benefits of deployment. A consideration of the DEPLOY applications reinforces these trends, additionally emphasising the importance of selecting formalisms suited to the problem domain and of effectively managing traceable links between requirements and models.