Formal Platform-Independent Design of Real-Time Systems

A. Sintotski, D.K. Hammer, O. van Roosmalen, and J. Hooman

Appeared in: Proceedings 13th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems, IEEE Computer Society Press, pages 163 - 170, 2001.

ABSTRACT

A formal approach for the development of real-time control systems is described. Our development process consists of two phases: the platform-independent phase, which includes specification, programming, and verification, and the second phase, where execution platform considerations (i.e. resource constraints) are taken into account. This development process supports the use of end-to-end timing constraints through the whole design process without splitting them apart. A real-time application is modeled as a parallel composition of objects communicating by means of asynchronous message passing. This work concentrates on a compositional framework that combines the specification and verification of functional requirements and end-to-end timing constraints into one consistent formal model. In this paper we apply the approach to the mine pump control system. The formal analysis shows that a previously published implementation of the mine pump control system is incorrect.

A extended version of this work appeared as

D.K. Hammer, J. Hooman, M.A. Reniers, O. van Roosmalen, A. Sintotski,
Design of the mine pump control system,
Computing Science Reports 01/05, Eindhoven University of Technology, p. 70, 2001.