False alarms investigating cause

Automatic fire detection systems are notorious for giving false alarms. However, many of the so-called false alarms, while not detecting a fire, have in fact detected an abnormal condition within the building. These need investigating since they may be an early indication of a condition that could build up to a fire. However, false alarms do occur and common causes include ... 

Since Astr6e is based on an abstract semantics of the program there can be false alarms, i.e. spurious notifications about potential runtime errors which are caused by the overapproximation inherent to the analysis. False alarms can also be caused by preconditions that have not been made known to Astree. Therefore, all alarms have to be investigated by the developers to determine whether they correspond to true errors which have to be Axed, or whether they are false alarms. This can cause significant effort. 

The purpose of investigating false alarms is to establish the immediate cause, for example unauthorised... 

It is very likely that the investigation into the false alarm will indicate that the alarm was caused by equipment faults, malicious acts, human error, or activities near detectors. 

During the investigation, if it is not possible to identify the cause of the false alarm, or if there seems to be a fault in the system, the alarm should be silenced but the system should not be reset in order to allow an engineer from the alarm company to investigate the fault. In any event if the equipment seems to be faulty, the alarm company that installed or maintains the equipment should be instructed to take the appropriate action. 

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