A life-critical system or safety-critical system is a system whose failure or malfunction may result in a) death or serious injury to people, or b) loss or severe damage to equipment or c) environmental harm. Risks of this sort are usually handled with safety engineering. Examples of some applications are listed below.

Software engineering for life-critical systems is particularly difficult, but the avionics industry has succeeded in producing standard methods for producing life-critical avionics software. This is sometimes done using programmable logic controllers. Formal methods are one approach to improving the software quality in safety-critical systems.

=Examples of life-critical systems=

==Infrastructure==

==Medicine==

The technology requirements can go beyond avoidance of failure, and can even facilitate medical intensive care (which deals with healing patients), and also life support (which is for stabilizing patients).

==Nuclear engineering==

==Recreation==

==Transport==

===Automotive===

===Aviation===

==See Also==

= External links =