Model Generation for Temporal Properties of Reactive Components

We present a new static analysis that generates a model of the temporal behaviour of a reactive component. The component is specified in machine code - this makes the analysis applicable to the legacy code and the output of any compiler. Our analysis is an abstract interpretation [2] of the program that computes the possible periodicities of instructions within a nonterminating program. The machine code is transformed into an abstract instruction set that retains only the timing characteristics of each instruction. We show how a simple abstraction of the timing state allows an abstract interpretation to construct a finite model of the components temporal behaviour. This model is useful for manual verification of a simple component or be used to construct an automatic verification through model-checking. The abstraction of time uses a relative measure of time; time is measured since the flow of control passed certain nominated positions