A Framework for the Certification and Evaluation of Real-Time Safety-Critical Intelligent Systems

Abstract

The concept of software architecture has recently emerged as a new way to improve our ability to effectively construct large scale software systems. However, there is no formal architecture specification language available to model and analyze temporal properties of complex real-time systems. In this paper, an object-oriented logic-based architecture specification language for real-time systems is discussed. Representation of the temporal properties and timing constraints, and their integration with the language to model real-time concurrent systems is given. Architecture based specification languages enable the construction of large system architectures and provide a means of testing and validation. In general, checking the timing constraints of real-time system is done by applying model checking to the constraint expressed as a formula in temporal logic. The complexity of such a formal method depends on the size of the representation of the system. It is possible that this size could increase exponentially when the system consists of several concurrently executing real-time processes. This means that the complexity of the algorithm will be exponential in the number of processes of the system and thus the size of the system becomes a limiting factor. Such a problem has been defined in the literature as the "state explosion problem". This paper proposes a method of incremental verification of architectural specifications for real-time systems. The method has a lower complexity in a sense that it does not work on the whole state space, but only on a subset of it that is relevant to the property to be verified.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1999
Accession Number
ADA359957

Entities

People

  • Jeffrey J. Tsai

Organizations

  • University of Illinois at Chicago

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Air Force Research Laboratories
  • Algorithms
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Calculus
  • Computations
  • Computer Science
  • Construction
  • Formal Languages
  • Intelligent Systems
  • Language
  • Military Research
  • Software Development
  • Specifications
  • Standards
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Verification

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Applied Combinatorial Optimization and Logic Circuit Design.
  • Software Engineering.

Technology Areas

  • Space