The Centre for Software Reliability (CSR) is an independent Research Centre in the School of Science & Technology, founded in 1983.
CSR deals with assessing and containing risk in systems that depend on software: with reliability, safety, security (dependability).
Our work applies to software-only systems, computer systems, and complex engineered and socio-technical systems: recent examples range from nuclear reactor protections systems to medical infusion pumps to an air traffic control system and critical infrastructures.
As innovation brings new IT systems, new uses of them, increased societal dependency on them, and new threats, risk and dependability challenges are continuously renewed; our work and application focus evolve with these needs.
Centre for Software Reliability website
Visit the Centre's research microsite for more information about the Centre, including areas of research, projects and related activities.
About the CSR
CSR's early work contributed to establishing methods for probabilistic assessment for failures caused by software, developing novel theories and techniques, different from those that had been developed over previous decades for hardware reliability.
Our focus quickly expanded into a wider systems viewpoint, addressing system safety and security, addressing not only software but also wider systems made up of software, hardware, people and organisations.
CSR's specific character is a critical mass of work on rigorous assessment, crucial for informing acceptance (or not) and risk management of these systems, as well as for driving their design.
Our methods and research areas involve a large component of probabilistic and statistical methods, assurance cases for organising complex evidence and reasoning, static verification and formal methods.
Over the years, CSR has attracted millions of pounds of funding for its research in the form of research grants, contracts and consulting. This has come from industry, charities and government organisations in the UK, EU and US.
About half of our research support has come from the UK's Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC).
CSR collaborates widely with academic and industrial organisations in the U.K. and abroad.