From design to implementation: an automated, credible autocoding chain for control systems

Abstract. This article describes a fully automated, credible autocod-ing chain for control systems. The framework generates code, along with guarantees of high level functional properties which can be independently verified. It relies on domain specific knowledge and fomal analysis to ad-dress a context of heightened safety requirements for critical embedded systems and ever-increasing costs of verification and validation. The plat-form strives to bridge the semantic gap between domain expert and code verification expert. First, a graphical dataflow language is extended with annotation symbols enabling the control engineer to express high level properties of its control law within the framework of a familiar language. An existing autocoder is enhanced to both generate the code implement-ing the initial design, but also to carry high level properties down to an-notations at the level of the code. Finally, using customized code analysis tools, certificates are generated which guarantee the correctness of the annotations with respect to the code, and can be verified using existing static analysis tools. While only a subset of properties and controllers are handled at this point, the approach appears readily extendable to a broader array of both