The Wireless Fire Alarm System: Ensuring Conformance to Industrial Standards through Formal Verification

The design of distributed, safety critical real-time systems is challenging due to their high complexity, the potentially large number of components, and complicated requirements and environment assumptions. Our case study shows that despite those challenges, the automated formal verification of such systems is not only possible, but practicable even in the context of small to medium-sized enterprises. We considered a wireless fire alarm system and uncovered severe design flaws. For an improved design, we provided dependable verification results which in particular ensure that conformance tests for a relevant regulation standard will be passed. In general we observe that if system tests are specified by generalized test procedures, then verifying that a system will pass any test following these test procedures is a cost-efficient approach to improve product quality based on formal methods.