Modeling Asynchronous Message Passing for C Programs

This paper presents a formal modeling paradigm that is callable from C, the dominant language for embedded systems programming, for message passing APIs that provides reasonable assurance that the model correctly captures intended behavior. The model is a suitable reference solution for the API, and it supports putative what-if queries over API scenarios for behavior exploration, reproducibility for test and debug, full exhaustive search, and other advanced model checking analysis methods for C programs that use the API. This paper illustrates the modeling paradigm on the MCAPI interface, a growing industry standard message passing library, showing how the model exposes errors hidden by the C reference solution provided by the Multicore Association.