Safety-critical systems are pervasive in the aerospace industry [EXPAND].

The development of safety-critical systems to be certified as highly safe requires various different skills and the use of a number of techniques from programming real-time applications to validation methods including testing and formal verification.

This document describes a research-based doctoral programme particularly targeted at the aerospace industry's human resources necessities in the area of computing. The programme trains researchers with a strong background in topics related to safety-critical systems. It comprises a first year of taught courses, followed by a research project leading to a thesis.

The first year is structured around a number of core courses to be taken by all students, together with a choice of elective courses. Moreover, the program also offers a few unifying courses to cover the foundations required by core courses. The offer of core course encompasses both programming, validation, and formal techniques.

1) Unifying Courses

• Logic and Algebraic Foundations
• Concurrent and Real-time Programming

2) Core Courses

• Formal Systems Modeling
• Model Checking: Principles and Tools
• Static Analysis and Program Verification Techniques
• Software Testing
• Certified Safety-critical Systems

3) Elective Courses

• Cryptographic Techniques
• (...)

The programme brings together European research groups with expertise in the above topics, that are involved in reserch projects in the area of safety-critical systems.

-- JorgeSousaPinto - 19 Feb 2009