Abstract
Programmable logic controllers (PLCs) are special embedded computers that are widely used in industrial control systems. To ensure the safety of industrial control systems, it is necessary to verify the correctness of PLCs. Formal verification is considered to be an effective method to verify whether a PLC program conforms to its specifications, but the expertise requirements and the complexity make it hard to be mastered and widely applied. In this paper, we present a specification-mining-based verification approach for IEC 61131-3 PLC programs. It only requires users to review specifications mined from the program behaviors instead of model checking for specified specifications, which can greatly improve the efficiency of safety verification and is much easier for control system engineers to use. Moreover, we implement a proof-of-concept tool named PLCInspector that supports directly mining LTL specifications and data invariants from PLC programs. Two examples and one real-life case study are presented to illustrate its practicability and efficiency. In addition, a comparison with the existing verification approaches for PLC programs is discussed.
Highlights
An industrial control system (ICS) is a kind of control system dedicated to industrial process control
The software-raised problems can be discovered by testing, simulation and formal verification for Programmable logic controllers (PLCs) programs
We present two examples and one real-life case study to illustrate the practicability of the implementation
Summary
An industrial control system (ICS) is a kind of control system dedicated to industrial process control. It plays critical roles in manufacturing plants and infrastructures such as car assembly plants, chemical plants, and even nuclear power plants. These control systems are commonly safety-critical, whose failures may cause major economic losses, human casualties or even disasters. Problems of PLC can be divided into two categories: hardware-raised and software-raised. The hardware-raised problems usually can be detected or avoided by verification using simulation, redundant mechanisms, and built-in diagnostics. The software-raised problems can be discovered by testing, simulation and formal verification for PLC programs. We are mainly concerned with the solution to ensure the safety of PLC software
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