Abstract. Program analysis is on the brink of mainstream usage in embedded systems development. Formal verification of behavioural requirements, finding runtime errors and test case generation are some of the most common applications of automated verification tools based on bounded model checking (BMC). Existing industrial tools for embedded software use an off-the-shelf bounded model checker and apply it iteratively to verify the program with an increasing number of unwindings. This approach unnecessarily wastes time repeating work that has already been done and fails to exploit the power of incremental SAT solving. This article reports on the extension of the software model checker CBMC to support incremental BMC and its successful integration with the industrial embedded software verification tool BTC EMBEDDEDTESTER. We present an extensive evaluation over large industrial embedded programs, mainly from the automotive industry. We show that incremental BMC cuts runtimes by one order of magnitude in comparison to the standard non-incremental approach, enabling the application of formal verification to large and complex embedded software. We furthermore report promising results on analysing programs with arbitrary loop structure using incremental BMC, demonstrating its applicability and potential to verify general software beyond the embedded domain.

The Statemate Verification Environment supports requirement analysis and specification development of embedded controllers as part of the Statemate product offering of I-Logix, Inc. This paper discusses key enhancements of the prototype tool reported in [2,5] in order to enable full scale industrial usage of the tool-set. It thus reports on a successfully completed technology transfer from a prototype tool-set to a commercial offering. The discussed enhancements are substantiated with performance results all taken from real industrial applications of leading companies in automotive and avionics.

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Program analysis is on the brink of mainstream usage in embedded systems development. Formal verification of behavioural requirements, finding runtime errors and automated test case generation are some of the most common applications of automated verification tools based on Bounded Model Checking (BMC). Existing industrial tools for embedded software use an off-the-shelf Bounded Model Checker and apply it iteratively to verify the program with an increasing number of unwindings. This approach unnecessarily wastes time repeating work that has already been done and fails to exploit the power of incremental SAT solving. This paper reports on the extension of the software model checker CBMC to support incremental BMC and its successful integration with the industrial embedded software verification tool BTC EMBEDDEDTESTER. We present an extensive evaluation over large industrial embedded programs, mainly from automotive industry. We show that incremental BMC cuts runtimes by one order of magnitude in comparison to the standard non-incremental approach, enabling the application of formal verification to large and complex embedded software.⋆ The research leading to these results has received funding from the ARTEMIS Joint Undertaking under grant agreement number 295311 "VeTeSS" and ERC project 280053 "CPROVER".