An integrated framework of formal methods for interaction behaviors among industrial equipments

Abstract

With the rapid advancement of Internet of Things, interaction behaviors among their industrial equipments have been complex dramatically whereas they have been becoming a kind of safety–critical systems and high requirements for safety have been urgent unprecedentedly. Therefore, it has been a great challenge for practicing engineers to ensure temporal correctness and reliability of interaction behaviors among industrial equipments. Nowadays, π-calculus, a process algebra and NuSMV, a symbolic model checker, have been widely applied to address this posed challenge respectively. However, they are always used separately. Because different formal methods focus on different aspects of systems, only one single method is still difficult to cope very well with the posed challenge. Therefore in this paper, an integrated framework of formal methods, which combines π-calculus with NuSMV, is constructed. π-Calculus can definitely specify equipment interaction, and NuSMV can automate verification process. Especially counterexamples fed back by NuSMV can help practicing engineers to trace temporal violations. Furthermore, a cooperative traffic lights control strategy is illuminated to show how the framework works.