Timing Analysis and Code Generation of Vehicle Control Software using Taxys

Abstract

PATH's automated vehicle control application software is responsible for the longitudinal and lateral control of each vehicle in a platoon [5]. The software consists of a set of processes running concurrently on a PC, reading data from various sensors (e.g., radar, speedometer, accelerometer, magnetometer), writing to actuators (throttle, brake and steering), and using radio to communicate data to other vehicles. The processes exchange data with each other using a publish/subscribe scheme. In this paper, we describe the current software, and propose a model written in the synchronous language Esterel [1]. We use Taxys [2,7], a tool for timing analysis of Esterel based on the Kronos model-checker [3], and the Esterel compiler Saxo-RT [6], to verify that the application meets its deadlines. Timing analysis is done on-the-fly during the execution of the appropriately instrumented C code generated by the compiler. Instrumentation allows the verifier to observe the execution time of the application code. The C code generated by Saxo-RT, appropriately linked to the publish/subscribe library, can be run on the vehicles.