Building Meaningful Timed Plant Models for Verification Purposes

This paper presents a method to build a formal model of a plant, in the form of a network of timed automata, to be used for model-based verification of controllers. To ensure re-usability, this model is built by instantiation of generic components models. When the instantiated components models are assembled, spurious evolutions leading to states which do not represent the real behavior of the plant, can occur, owing to the rich semantics of the modeling formalism. Then a modeling strategy is proposed in order to discard these evolutions so as to reduce the state space of the plant model to the only meaningful states. The method is exemplified and discussed on a small case study.