Formal Analysis for Embedded Real-Time Systems

International audienceTimed systems are notoriously hard to de-bug and to verify because the continuous nature of time allows vast numbers of different behaviors; embedded systems must often deal with faults, and these introduce another dimension of complexity. Simulation and testing provide little assurance in these domains because they can visit only a small fraction of the possible behaviors. Formal methods of analysis have some promise, but until recently they could deal only with one dimension at a time: classical model checking could cope with faults but could not model continuous time; model checkers for timed automata could deal with continuous time but not the "case ex-plosion" due to faults. Recently, a new class of "infinite bounded" model checkers has been developed; these show promise that they can cope simultaneously with both continuous time and discrete faults