Automatic modelling and verification of Autosar architectures

Abstract

Autosar (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture) is a development partnership whose primary goal is the standardization of basic system functions and functional interfaces for electronic control units in automobiles. As an open specification, its layered software architecture promotes the interoperability of real-time embedded vehicle systems and components. It also opens up the possibility of formal modelling and verification approaches, centred around the specification, that can be used to support analysis in the early stages of design. In this paper, we describe a methodology and associated tool, called A2A, that automatically models systems defined by the Autosar specifications as timed automata, and then verifies their timing properties using Uppaal. It contains 22 groups of timed automata templates, together with two auxiliary test templates, that model the Autosar architecture and timing properties, allowing time-related behaviours to be extracted from the three-layer architecture, i.e., the Autosar Software, Autosar Runtime Environment, and Basic Software layers, and templates to be automatically instantiated. The timing properties are specified using timed computation tree logic (TCTL) in Uppaal to verify the system model. We demonstrate the capabilities of the methodology by applying it to an Autosar architecture that describes an internal vehicle light control system, thereby showing its effectiveness.