Improving the quality of embedded systems by formal design and systematic testing (CES.5008)

Add-controls is a typical instance of a medium sized enterprise (SME) that produces programmed embedded controllers for small and medium size applications. One can think, for instance, of complex hydraulic lift systems and valves. An important activity of Weidmller is to produce software for such controllers. Add-controls wants to deliver products of the highest quality but experienced that this is almost unattainable with software. It happens too often that finalized software still contains bugs, which probably could often be avoided by using better methods for design and testing.

Therefore, Add-controls set up a project to automatically test the software, in order to make testing reproducable, to allow testing of series of events occuring in small time intervals, and to increase the number of tests considerably.

This proposal is intended to go beyond the current ambitions of Add-controls by introducing formal specification, formal analysis and formal test generation techniques for developing embedded software. The goal of this project is to establish whether it is possible to achieve reliable quality of software for medium size embedded systems in this way, and to better utilize the formal methods in industry. The formal methods we refer to have already proven their usefulness for several years, although mainly from an academic perspective.

Supported by earlier experiences with research for products of Add-controls, the expectation that the outcome of the project will be positive is fairly reasonable. When successful, the project will yield the backbone of a practically tested development environment for reliable embedded software. In any case it will provide a thorough analysis of the potentials of formal analysis techniques for small and medium size embedded systems, which must be regarded a relevant application domain.

For results, see http://www.cwi.nl/~pangjun/CES5008/

Five companies and two other universities are involved in this project.