Automatic NCES-based specification and SESA-based verification of feasible control components in benchmark production systems

Abstract

This paper deals with automatic refinement-based specifications and verifications of component-based embedded control systems in manufacturing industry. To be independent of any technology, we define the concept of control component as a software unit that reads and interprets data from sensors to activate thereafter corresponding actuators of the plant that we assume as a set of physical processes with precedence constraints. We model at first time the system by an abstract model according to the formalism net condition/event systems, before automatic refinements of this model are recursively applied in different hierarchical levels to define and specify control components. To satisfy user requirements, these components are checked in each step of refinement by applying the model checker SESA to automatically verify deadlock properties and to manually check other functional and temporal properties described by users according to the well-known temporal logic computation tree logic. This approach optimises the development cost of critical embedded systems, controls the complexity of model-checking and is applied on two benchmark production systems FESTO and EnAS available in our research laboratory to prove its benefits.