Implementation of Formally Veriied Real Time
Distributed Systems: Simpliied light control
system
Nahla A. El-Araby
Electrical and Electronics Eng. Dept.,
Canadian International College,
Cairo, Egypt
nahla _ alaraby@cic-cairo.com
WW .Clc-cmro.com
Abstract-The most common procedure to ensure the
reliability of a design is simulation. Unfortunately
simulation cannot fully inspect all the execution states of
the system. The signiicant increase in the complexity
and size of digital systems together with the nature of
real time systems boosted up the need for a different
approach for the validation of the behavior of a system
in the early design stages. Formal veriication is an
approach to validate a system by formally reasoning the
system behavior. In formal veriication the system
implementation is checked against the requirements or
the properties to be satisied. B method is one of the
common paradigms used in formal veriication. But in
some cases some deviations from the veriied model
appears in the inal implementation phase, so some of
the veriied properties are lost.
This work aims to reach for a complete design low for
veriication and implementation of a simpliied light
control system, as an example of a system consisting of a
number of distributed computing devices that are
interconnected together through digital communication
channels. The B method was used to formalize and
verify, then the veriied B model was transformed into
VHDL implementation concerning exact mapping to
maintain the properties of the veriied model. The main
objective is to avoid any discrepancies between the
veriied model and its implementation.
Keywords-Formal Verication; B method; Real time
systems; Theorem proving; VHDL.
I. INTRODUCTION
People and goods safety are directly affected by the
reliability of automated systems. Safety aspects
should be considered from early design stages up to
operational stages and this needs a very accurate
design approach [1]. This becomes more sophisticated
in real time systems as they differ from untimed
systems in that the correct behavior relies on
computation results plus the time on which they were
produced. The resulting state-space explosion makes
it infeasible to run a satisfactory number of simulation
traces to achieve enough coverage of the state spaces
978-1-4577-0128-3/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE 25
Ayman M. Wahba, Mohamed M. Taher
Computer and Systems Eng. Dept.,
Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University,
Cairo, Egypt
ayman.wahba@eng.asu.edu.eg,
mohamed.taher@eng.asu.edu.eg
http://eng.asu.edu.eg
and enough conidence in the design correctness
within a project schedule. Even if it were feasible to
have extensive coverage of the system, missing only
single untested sequence of events may cause the
system failure.
Formal veriication means to thoroughly investigate
the correctness of system designs expressed as
mathematical models. Formal veriication is a useul
and powerul technique for guaranteeing the
reliability of systems in design stages [2]. In recent
years, several approaches to applying formal
veriication techniques on automation systems
dependability have been proposed. These range rom
formal veriication by theorem proving [3] to formal
veriication by model-checking [4, 5, 6, 7]. Many
achievements in the formal veriication of real-time
systems are presented in [8], [9], [10], and [11].
Most major projects are spending over 50% of their
development costs in veriication and integration, so
using formal veriication can substantially reduce the
explosive growth of veriication and integration costs
and improve the quality of system designs in industry.
It is claimed that this approach has already had a
remarkable effect on the SLAM project of Microsot,
which plans to include model-checking capability in
its Windows driver development kit (DDK) [12].
Hardware systems are usually implemented using
hardware description languages like VHDL or
Verilog. So ater a model is completely veriied
against speciic properties using any of the formal
veriication methods, it is now ready to be coded
using the hardware description language. In some
cases one or more of the veriied properties is lost
during the design implementation. So this research is
aiming to ind a method for directly transforming
veriied models into the implementation maintaining
all the veriied properties.
A simpliied light control system was used, as an
example of a system consisting of a number of