An ontology-based approach to support formal verification of concurrent systems

Abstract

Formal verification ensures the absence of design errors in a system with respect to system’s requirements. This is especially important for the control software of critical systems, ranging from automatic components of avionics and spacecrafts to modules of distributed banking transactions. In this paper, we present a verification support framework that enables automatic extraction of a concurrent system’s requirements from the technical documentation and formal verification of the system design using an external or built-in verification tool that checks whether the system meets the extracted requirements. Our support approach also provides visualization and editing options for both the system model and requirements. The key data components of our framework are ontological descriptions of the verified system and its requirements. We describe the methods used in our support framework and we illustrate their work for the use case of an automatic control system.