Specification, modelling, verification and runtime analysis of real time systems

This book focuses on the use of formal methods in order to guarantee the correctness of real-time systems. For this purpose, the formal framework Equinox is introduced, which allows the specification, modelling, verification and runtime analysis of real-time systems. New sophisticated methods allow a formally verifiable design, development and realization of real-time systems directly out of synchronous languages. This enables for the first time a bridging between industrial real-time descriptions and formal real-time verification. Up till now, other approaches must take special real-time description formats into account. Timed Kripke structures are introduced as formal models, in order to allow abstractions in real-time systems, without loss of quantitative properties. The ability of modelling non-interruptible processes and atomic timed actions enables also the low-level verification of real-time systems. The new temporal logic JCTL has been developed as a real-time extension of the widely used logic CTL. Overcoming the problems of other real-time logics, JCTL is directly defined on timed Kripke structures and allows the use of established symbolic techniques. New sophisticated methods handle the parallel execution of processes efficiently. In contrast to other approaches, these methods enable the direct generation of a final formal model without parallel composition of single sub-models, avoiding several known problems, like state space explosion, or deadlocks and timelocks. An exact and detailed low-level runtime analysis is introduced, which in combination with the modelling capabilities of timed Kripke structures enables for the first time the low-level verification of real-time systems.