Formal verification of control software

Abstract

In a context of heightened requirements for safety-critical embedded systems and ever-increasing costs of verification and validation, this research proposes to advance the state of formal analysis for control software. Formal methods are a field of computer science that uses mathematical techniques and formalisms to rigorously analyze the behavior of programs. This research develops a framework and tools to express and prove high level properties of control law implementations. One goal is to bridge the gap between control theory and computer science. An annotation language is extended with symbols and axioms to describe control-related concepts at the code level. Libraries of theorems, along with their proofs, are developed to enable an interactive proof assistant to verify control-related properties. Through integration in a prototype tool, the process of verification is made automatic, and applied to several example systems.In a context of heightened requirements for safety-critical embedded systems and ever-increasing costs of verification and validation, this research proposes to advance the state of formal analysis for control software. Formal methods are a field of computer science that uses mathematical techniques and formalisms to rigorously analyze the behavior of programs. This research develops a framework and tools to express and prove high level properties of control law implementations. One goal is to bridge the gap between control theory and computer science. An annotation language is extended with symbols and axioms to describe control-related concepts at the code level. Libraries of theorems, along with their proofs, are developed to enable an interactive proof assistant to verify control-related properties. Through integration in a prototype tool, the process of verification is made automatic, and applied to several example systems.