Toward a Dependability Case Language and Workflow for a Radiation Therapy System

We present a near-future research agenda for bringing a suite of modern programming-languages verification tools – specifically interactive theorem proving, solver-aided languages, and formally defined domain-specific languages – to the development of a specific safety-critical system, a radiotherapy medical device. We sketch how we believe recent programming-languages research advances can merge with existing best practices for safety-critical systems to increase system assurance and developer productivity. We motivate hypotheses central to our agenda: That we should start with a single specific system and that we need to integrate a variety of complementary verification and synthesis tools into system development. 1998 ACM Subject Classification D.2.4 Software/Program Verification, J.3 Life and Medical Sciences