REVERT: runtime verification for real-time systems

Abstract

Real-time systems are becoming more complex and open, thus increasing their development and verification costs. Although several static verification tools have been proposed over the last decades, they suffer from scalability and precision problems. As a result, the tools fail to cover all the necessary safety properties for realistic real-time applications involving a large number of components and tasks. Runtime verification is a formal technique that verifies properties during system execution with the support of monitors. The monitors are generated from formal languages using correct-by-construction generation methods. Runtime verification can thus be used as a complement or replacement for static verification approaches. The current state-of-the-art tools either do not have notion of time, or suffer from the potential blowup of states at run-time. This thesis proposes Revert, a framework developed with a focus on the verification of functional and non-functional properties with timing constraints. The contribution of this work is threefold: (i) a domain-specific specification language allowing the definition of requirements for real-time applications; (ii) a novel mechanism to generate monitors, with state-space and time guarantees, capable of identifying and reacting to timing properties defined with the proposed specification language. (iii) a tool that automatically transforms specifications written in Revert to monitors specified as complete timed deterministic finite automata in xml format.