Formal Verification of Spacecraft Control Programs

Abstract

Verification of correctness of control programs is an essential task in the development of space electronics; it is difficult and typically outweighs design and programming tasks in terms of development hours. This article presents a verification approach designed to help spacecraft engineers reduce the effort required for formal verification of low-level control programs executed on custom hardware. The verification approach is demonstrated on an industrial case study. We present a REDuced instruction set for Fixed-point and INteger arithmetic (REDFIN), a processing core used in space missions, and its formal semantics expressed using the proposed metalanguage for state transformers, followed by examples of verification of simple control programs.