Model checking has become a promising technique for verifying software and hardware designs; it has been routinely used in hardware verification, and a number of case studies and industrial applications show its effectiveness in software verification as well. Nevertheless, most existing model checkers are specialized for limited aspects of a system, where each of them requires a certain level of expertise to use the tool in the right domain in the right way. Hardly any guideline is available on choosing the right model checker for a particular problem domain, which makes adopting the technique difficult in practice, especially for verifying software with high complexity.In this work, we investigate the relative pitfalls and benefits of using the explicit model checker Spin on commercial Flight Guidance Systems (FGSs) at Rockwell-Collins, based on the author's prior experience with the use of the symbolic model checker NuSMV on the same systems. This has been a question from the beginning of the project with RockwellCollins. The challenge includes the efficient use of Spin for the complex synchronous mode logic with a large number of state variables, where Spin is known to be not particulary efficient. We present the way the Spin model is optimized to avoid the state space explosion problem and discuss the implication of the result. We hope our experience can be a useful reference for the future use of model checking in a similar domain.

Abstract. In today's information society, flash memory has become a virtually indispensable component, particularly for mobile devices. In order for mobile devices to operate successfully, it is essential that flash memory be controlled correctly through file system software. However, as is typical for embedded software, conventional testing methods often fail to detect hidden flaws in the software due to the difficulty of creating effective test cases. As a different approach, model checking techniques guarantee a complete analysis, but only on a limited scale. In this paper, we describe an empirical study wherein a concolic testing method is applied to the multi-sector read operation for a flash memory. This method combines a symbolic static analysis and a concrete dynamic analysis to automatically generate test cases and perform exhaustive path testing accordingly. In addition, we analyze the advantages and weaknesses of the concolic testing approach on the domain of the flash file system compared to model checking techniques.

Inaccuracies, or deviations, in the measurements of monitored variables in a control system are facts of life that control software must accommodate. Deviation analysis can be used to determine how a software specification will behave in the face of such deviations. Deviation analysis is intended to answer questions such as "What is the effect on output O if input I is off by 0 to 100?". This property is best checked with some form of symbolic execution approach. In this report we wish to propose a new approach to deviation analysis using model checking techniques. The key observation that allows us to use model checkers is that the property can be restated as "Will there be an effect on output O if input I is off by 0 to 100?"-this restatement of the property changes the analysis from an exploratory analysis to a verification task suitable for model checking.

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Component-based software development is a promising approach for controlling the complexity and quality of software systems. Nevertheless, recent advances in quality control techniques do not seem to keep up with the growing complexity of embedded software; embedded systems often consist of dozens to hundreds of software/hardware components that exhibit complex interaction behavior. Unanticipated quality defects in a component can be a major source of system failure. To address this issue, this paper suggests a design verification approach integrated into the model-driven, component-based development methodology Marmot. The notion of abstract components-the basic building blocks of Marmot-helps to lift the level of abstraction, facilitates high-level reuse, and reduces verification complexity by localizing verification problems between abstract components before refinement and after refinement. This enables the identification of unanticipated design errors in the early stages of development.the Marmot methodology, presents a design verification approach in Marmot, and demonstrates its application on the development of a μ-controller-based abstraction of a car mirror control system. An application on TinyOS shows that the approach helps to reuse models as well as their verification results in the development process.Keywords Abstract component · Model-driven development · Design verification · Embedded systems

Abstract. Flash memory has become virtually indispensable in most mobile devices. In order for mobile devices to operate successfully, it is essential that flash memory be controlled correctly through the device driver software. However, as is typical for embedded software, conventional testing methods often fail to detect hidden flaws in the complex device driver software. This deficiency incurs significant development and operation overhead to the manufacturers. In order to compensate for the weaknesses of conventional testing, we have applied NuSMV, Spin, and CBMC to verify the correctness of a multi-sector read operation of the Samsung OneNAND TM flash device driver and studied their relative strengths and weaknesses empirically. Through this project, we verified the correctness of the multi-sector read operation on a small scale. The results demonstrate the feasibility of using model checking techniques to verify the control algorithm of a device driver in an industrial setting.

SUMMARYModel checking is an effective technique used to identify subtle problems in software safety using a comprehensive search algorithm. However, this comprehensiveness requires a large number of resources and is often too expensive to be applied in practice. This work strives to find a practical solution to model‐checking automotive operating systems for the purpose of safety analysis, with minimum requirements and a systematic engineering approach for applying the technique in practice. The paper presents methods for converting the Trampoline kernel code into formal models for the model checker SPIN, a series of experiments using an incremental verification approach, and the use of embedded C constructs for performance improvement. The conversion methods include functional modularization and treatment for hardware‐dependent code, such as memory access for context switching. The incremental verification approach aims at increasing the level of confidence in the verification even when comprehensiveness cannot be provided because of the limitations of the hardware resource. We also report on potential safety issues found in the Trampoline operating system during the experiments and present experimental evidence of the performance improvement using the embedded C constructs in SPIN. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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