Analyzing the restart behavior of industrial control applications

Abstract

Critical infrastructure such as chemical plants, manufacturing facilities or tidal barrages are usually operated using specialized control devices. These devices are programmed using domain-specific programming languages for which static code analysis techniques are not widely used yet. This paper compares a sophisticated academic tool to a lightweight compliance check approach regarding the detection of programming errors that only occur after program restart. As this is a common problem in industrial control code, the paper proposes a way to improve the accuracy of analyses for this class of errors.