A Formal Method for Modeling, Verification and Synthesis of Embedded Reactive Systems

Abstract

Embedded reactive systems are now invisible and everywhere, and are adopted, for instance, to monitor and control critical tasks in cars, airplanes, traffic, and industrial plants. However, the increasing amount of new functionalities being moved to software leads to difficulties in verifying the design correctness. In this context, we propose a novel design method called BARE Model, which is a formal abstraction to design, verify and synthesize software in embedded reactive applications. The method consists in designing the application using an extension of the well-known finite state machine, called X-machine. We thus propose to translate this model to a tabular data structure, which is a kind of state transition table augmented with memory input, memory output, and condition (or guard). This tabular structure may be automatically translated to the input of the NuSMV model checker in order to verify the system’s properties. We also propose a runtime environment to execute the system (expressed as a tabular data structure) in a specific platform. In this way, we can convert the high-level specification into executable code that runs on a target platform. To show the practical usability of our proposed method, we experimented it with the Envirotrack case study. The experiment shows that the proposed method is able to not only model the system, but also to verify safety and liveness properties, and synthesize executable code of real-world applications.

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