Formal Specification and Object-Oriented Design

Abstract

In the summer of 1988, an Iranian civilian aircraft was shot down by the USS Vincennes over the Gulf of Persia, killing all of the 290 passengers and crew within. The following winter, in what has been widely represented as a retaliatory gesture, a Pan American Jumbo jet was blown up over Scotland, killing the 270 occupants on board. An enquiry into the original incident has since blamed computer error for the calamity. At the critical point, the software-controlled radar system mistakenly identified the Iranian airbus as an aggressive military target. Thus, two major international incidents involving the loss of many hundreds of innocent lives may eventually be attributed to a programming error.