Abstract
Due to the risk of discharge sparks and ignition, there are strict rules concerning the safety of high voltage electrostatic systems used in industrial painting robots. In order to assure that the system fulfils its safety requirements, formal verification is an important tool to supplement traditional testing and quality assurance procedures. The work in this paper presents formal verification of the most important safety functions of a high voltage controller. The controller has been modelled as a finite state machine, which was formally verified using two different model checking software tools; Simulink Design Verifier and RoboTool. Five safety critical properties were specified and formally verified using the two tools. Simulink was chosen as a low-threshold entry point since MathWorks products are well known to most practitioners. RoboTool serves as a software tool targeted towards model checking, thus providing more advanced options for the more experienced user. The comparative study and results show that all properties were successfully verified. The verification times in both tools were in the order of a few minutes, which was within the acceptable time limit for this particular application.
Highlights
Formal verification provides an extra level of assurance by verifying the logic of a system and making sure that it works in accordance to its specifications in every situation
RoboTool serves as a software tool targeted towards model checking, providing more advanced options for the more experienced user
In addition to presenting and analyzing an interesting industrial use case considering formal verification of the safety aspects of the High Voltage Controller (HVC) unit of a paint robot, the main objective of this work is to do a comparative study of the software tools with regards to functionality, usability and effectiveness, e.g., modelling, validation and analysis time
Summary
Formal verification provides an extra level of assurance by verifying the logic of a system and making sure that it works in accordance to its specifications in every situation. The methodology of model checking has some apparent advantages that fits industrial applications very well; it is a rather general verification approach which has some commercial-grade, high-performance model checkers available It provides diagnostic information (counter-example) that can be used for debugging purposes, is easier to integrate with existing development and engineering practices and last but not least; is more intuitive and familiar to most practitioners than theorem proving [2]. In addition to presenting and analyzing an interesting industrial use case considering formal verification of the safety aspects of the HVC unit of a paint robot, the main objective of this work is to do a comparative study of the software tools with regards to functionality, usability and effectiveness, e.g., modelling, validation and analysis time.
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