Robust safety of timed automata

Timed automata are governed by an idealized semantics that assumes a perfectly precise behavior of the clocks. The traditional semantics is not robust because the slightest perturbation in the timing of actions may lead to completely different behaviors of the automaton. Following several recent works, we consider a relaxation of this semantics, in which guards on transitions are widened byΔ>0 and clocks can drift byε>0. The relaxed semantics encompasses the imprecisions that are inevitably present in an implementation of a timed automaton, due to the finite precision of digital clocks. We solve the safety verification problem for this robust semantics: given a timed automaton and a set of bad states, our algorithm decides if there exist positive values for the parametersΔ andε such that the timed automaton never enters the bad states under the relaxed semantic

Robust Analysis of Timed Automata via Channel Machines

International audienceWhereas formal verification of timed systems has become a very active field of research, the idealised mathematical semantics of timed automata cannot be faithfully implemented. Several works have thus focused on a modified semantics of timed automata which ensures implementability, and robust model-checking algorithms for safety, and later LTL properties have been designed. Recently, a~new approach has been proposed, which reduces (standard) model-checking of timed automata to other verification problems on channel machines. Thanks to a new encoding of the modified semantics as a network of timed systems, we propose an original combination of both approaches, and prove that robust model-checking for coFlat-MTL, a large fragment of~MTL, is EXPSPACE-Complete

History-Deterministic Timed Automata

International audienceWe explore the notion of history-determinism in the context of timed automata (TA). Historydeterministic automata are those in which nondeterminism can be resolved on the fly, based on the run constructed thus far. History-determinism is a robust property that admits different game-based characterisations, and history-deterministic specifications allow for game-based verification without an expensive determinization step. We show yet another characterisation of history-determinism in terms of fair simulation, at the general level of labelled transition systems: a system is history-deterministic precisely if and only if it fairly simulates all language smaller systems. For timed automata over infinite timed words it is known that universality is undecidable for Büchi TA. We show that for history-deterministic TA with arbitrary parity acceptance, timed universality, inclusion, and synthesis all remain decidable and are ExpTime-complete. For the subclass of TA with safety or reachability acceptance, we show that checking whether such an automaton is history-deterministic is decidable (in ExpTime), and history-deterministic TA with safety acceptance are effectively determinizable without introducing new automata states

Robust Model-Checking of Linear-Time Properties in Timed Automata

International audienceFormal verification of timed systems is well understood, but their \emphimplementation is still challenging. Recent works by Raskin \emphet al. have brought out a model of parameterized timed automata that can be used to prove \emphimplementability of timed systems for safety properties. We define here a more general notion of robust model-checking for linear-time properties, which consists in verifying whether a property still holds even if the transitions are slightly delayed or expedited. We provide PSPACE algorithms for the robust model-checking of Büchi-like and LTL properties. We also verify bounded-response-time properties

Re-verification of a Lip Synchronization Protocol using Robust Reachability

The timed automata formalism is an important model for specifying and analysing real-time systems. Robustness is the correctness of the model in the presence of small drifts on clocks or imprecision in testing guards. A symbolic algorithm for the analysis of the robustness of timed automata has been implemented. In this paper, we re-analyse an industrial case lip synchronization protocol using the new robust reachability algorithm. This lip synchronization protocol is an interesting case because timing aspects are crucial for the correctness of the protocol. Several versions of the model are considered: with an ideal video stream, with anchored jitter, and with non-anchored jitter

Re-verification of a Lip Synchronization Algorithm using robust reachability

The timed automata formalism is an important model for specifying and analysing real-time systems. Robustness is the correctness of the model in the presence of small drifts on clocks or imprecision in testing guards. A symbolic algorithm for the analysis of the robustness of timed automata has been implemented. In this paper we re-analyse an industrial case lip synchronization protocol using the new robust reachability algorithm.This lip synchronization protocol is an interesting case because timing aspect are crucial for the correctness of the protocol. Several versions of the model are considered, with an ideal video stream, with anchored jitter, and with non-anchored jitter

A Survey on Continuous Time Computations

We provide an overview of theories of continuous time computation. These theories allow us to understand both the hardness of questions related to continuous time dynamical systems and the computational power of continuous time analog models. We survey the existing models, summarizing results, and point to relevant references in the literature

Quantitative Verification: Formal Guarantees for Timeliness, Reliability and Performance

Computerised systems appear in almost all aspects of our daily lives, often in safety-critical scenarios such as embedded control systems in cars and aircraft or medical devices such as pacemakers and sensors. We are thus increasingly reliant on these systems working correctly, despite often operating in unpredictable or unreliable environments. Designers of such devices need ways to guarantee that they will operate in a reliable and efficient manner. Quantitative verification is a technique for analysing quantitative aspects of a system's design, such as timeliness, reliability or performance. It applies formal methods, based on a rigorous analysis of a mathematical model of the system, to automatically prove certain precisely specified properties, e.g. ``the airbag will always deploy within 20 milliseconds after a crash'' or ``the probability of both sensors failing simultaneously is less than 0.001''. The ability to formally guarantee quantitative properties of this kind is beneficial across a wide range of application domains. For example, in safety-critical systems, it may be essential to establish credible bounds on the probability with which certain failures or combinations of failures can occur. In embedded control systems, it is often important to comply with strict constraints on timing or resources. More generally, being able to derive guarantees on precisely specified levels of performance or efficiency is a valuable tool in the design of, for example, wireless networking protocols, robotic systems or power management algorithms, to name but a few. This report gives a short introduction to quantitative verification, focusing in particular on a widely used technique called model checking, and its generalisation to the analysis of quantitative aspects of a system such as timing, probabilistic behaviour or resource usage. The intended audience is industrial designers and developers of systems such as those highlighted above who could benefit from the application of quantitative verification,but lack expertise in formal verification or modelling

Language Emptiness of Continuous-Time Parametric Timed Automata

Parametric timed automata extend the standard timed automata with the possibility to use parameters in the clock guards. In general, if the parameters are real-valued, the problem of language emptiness of such automata is undecidable even for various restricted subclasses. We thus focus on the case where parameters are assumed to be integer-valued, while the time still remains continuous. On the one hand, we show that the problem remains undecidable for parametric timed automata with three clocks and one parameter. On the other hand, for the case with arbitrary many clocks where only one of these clocks is compared with (an arbitrary number of) parameters, we show that the parametric language emptiness is decidable. The undecidability result tightens the bounds of a previous result which assumed six parameters, while the decidability result extends the existing approaches that deal with discrete-time semantics only. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first positive result in the case of continuous-time and unbounded integer parameters, except for the rather simple case of single-clock automata