A Methodology and Support Tools for Analysis of Real-Time Specifications

As software control of time-critical functions in embedded systems becomes more common, a means for the precise specification of their behavior and formal methods for analyzing system requirements becomes increasingly important. Modechart is a graphical specification language introduced to meet this need. The main focus of paper is on methods and supporting tools for representing and reasoning about properties of time-critical systems specified in Modechart. The paper describes a verification methodology which takes advantage of the structuring inherent in a Modechart specification to determine whether a system specification satifies the required properties. The paper also describes the implementation of a mechanical verifier, based on the proposed approach, which has been recently integrated as part of the Modechart Toolset prototype development environment from the Naval Research Lab [7]. Supported in part by a research grant from the Office of Naval Research under ONR contract number N0014-94-1-0582