Timed Automata Approach to Distributed and Fault Tolerant System Verification

This article deals with a distributed, fault-tolerant real-time application modeling by timed automata. The application under consideration consists of several processors communicating via Controller Area Network (CAN); each processor executes an application that consists of fault-tolerant tasks running under an operating system (e.g. OSEK) and using inter-task synchronization primitives. For such system, the model checking tool (e.g. UPAALL) can be used to verify complex time and logical properties formalized as a safety or bounded liveness properties (e.g. end-to-end response time considering occurrence of a fault, state reachability). The main contribution of this paper is that the proposed model reduces size of the statespace by sharing clocks measuring the execution time of tasks and simply incorporates fault-tolerant features of the application.