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Formal semantics for the PACEMAKER system specification

Published:18 October 2014Publication History
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Abstract

This paper formally expresses the timing behavior of a cardiac pacemaker as defined in the PACEMAKER System Specification as understood by its principal author.

The PACEMAKER System Specification was publicly released by Boston Scientific to provide a real-world subject for application of formal methods in response to Jim Woodcock's request at FM2006 for an industrial Grand Challenge problem. PACEMAKER's use for purposes other than formal methods has been surprising in its variety. Most ambitious is the Software Certification Consortium's mock regulatory submission, PACEMAKER Grand Challenge, to show that a product with safety-critical software is in fact safe. McMaster University is designing a second-generation hardware platform to execute formally-verified software during system feature test validation with an electrical heart simulator to show correct behavior.

This paper uses first-order predicates, extended with a simple temporal operator, to formally express what the principal author understands to be "correct" behavior defined in PACEMAKER.

References

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  4. Dominique Méry, Bernhard Schätz, and Alan Wassyng, The Pacemaker Challenge: Developing Certifiable Medical Devices (Dagstuhl Seminar 14062), Dagstuhl Reports 4 (2014), no. 2, 17--37.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
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  1. Formal semantics for the PACEMAKER system specification

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM SIGAda Ada Letters
      ACM SIGAda Ada Letters  Volume 34, Issue 3
      HILT '14
      December 2014
      93 pages
      ISSN:1094-3641
      DOI:10.1145/2692956
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      • cover image ACM Conferences
        HILT '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGAda annual conference on High integrity language technology
        October 2014
        116 pages
        ISBN:9781450332170
        DOI:10.1145/2663171

      Copyright © 2014 ACM

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 18 October 2014

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