The formal design of distributed controllers with _d SL and Spin

Abstract

We study the formal verification of programs written in d SL, an extension of the standard ST language used to program industrial controllers. It proposes a trade off between industrial and formal verification worlds. The main advantage of d SL is to provide a transparent code distribution through low level communication mechanisms. The behavior of the synthesized distributed system can therefore be formally modeled, easily monitored and formally verified. The verification of a d SL program, realized with the Spin tool, is eased by the definition of a lattice of models linked with a simulation relation preserving next-free LTL formulae. We show that, although d SL is an industrial programming language, it gives the possibility to verify systems designed with it. We illustrate the benefit of our approach with a simple control system of two canal locks.

Testing Distributed Systems Through Symbolic Model Checking

“…We still need to validate our approach on more realistic examples. For that purpose, our method will be integrated shortly in our tool TraX and fully interfaced with our distributed controllers design environment d SL [1,2] to allow efficient testing of real industrial distributed controllers. We will also continue to investiguate possible further improvements of our technique, as the one inspired on the RCtl model checking with computation slicing described in [15].…”

“…When the purpose of such a system is to perform some control of critical equipment like an industrial plant, a plane, or a satellite, its correctness is extremely important. The designer can ease her work by various techniques [1,2,3] including validation and debugging. In particular, traditional model-based approaches abstract the action the system can do into events which change the system's global state.…”