Towards the verification of temporal data consistency in Real-Time Data Management

Abstract

Many Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) require both timeliness of computation and temporal consistency of their data. Therefore, when using real-time databases in a real-time CPS application, the Real-Time Database Management Systems (RTDBMSs) must ensure both transaction timeliness and temporal data consistency. RTDBMSs prevent unwanted interferences of concurrent transactions via concurrency control, which in turn has a significant impact on the timeliness and temporal consistency of data. Therefore it is important to verify, already at early design stages that these properties are not breached by the concurrency control. However, most often such early on guarantees of properties under concurrency control are missing. In this paper we show how to verify transaction timeliness and temporal data consistency using model checking. We model the transaction work units, the data and the concurrency control mechanism as a network of timed automata, and specify the properties in TCTL. The properties are then checked exhaustively and automatically using the UPPAAL model checker.