OREANDA-NEWS. Hitachi announced the co-development of a technology to verify software specifications in highly efficient software development of reliable large-scale software in social infrastructure systems, together with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich ("ETH") and Hitachi India Pvt. Ltd.

The technology developed employs formal methods that are techniques suited to the development of high quality software regarding reliability and security. It was verified that if a model is developed and its quality is verified, by re-using this model in the development of other systems, the development time to generate and verify new models can be reduced by approximately 80%. Hitachi will release the supporting tool as open source software from today to promote its use and improvement in real applications.

In social infrastructure such as energy supply, public systems and railways, it is essential to efficiently develop software that is able to address the complexity and scale of the system while maintaining a high level of reliability. In recent years, formal methods have received attention as techniques for the development of such high quality software requiring safety and security, and its use is recommended in international standards. Formal methods differ from previous techniques, which check the quality after the software is developed, in that it systematically confirms the accuracy of design descriptions during software development. Thus, software development time is greatly influenced by how efficiently this confirmation process is conducted.

The software technology developed re-employs models created with formal methods, and by doing so, significantly reduces the confirmation process thus shortening development time.