Many Distributed Real-Time Systems (DRTS), such as integrated modular avionics systems and distributed control systems in
motor vehicles, are made up of a collection of components communicating asynchronously among themselves and with their environment
that must change their state and respond to environment inputs within
hard real-time bounds. Such systems are often safety-critical and need
to be certi???ed; but their certi???cation is currently very hard due to their
distributed nature. The Physically Asynchronous Logically Synchronous
(PALS) architectural pattern can greatly reduce the design and veri???cation complexities of achieving virtual synchrony in a DTRS. This work
presents a formal speci???cation of PALS as a formal model transformation that maps a synchronous design, together with a set of performance
bounds of the underlying infrastructure, to a formal DRTS speci???cation
that is semantically equivalent to the synchronous design. This semantic
equivalence is proved, showing that the formal veri???cation of temporal
logic properties of the DRTS can be reduced to their veri???cation on the
much simpler synchronous design. An avionics system case study is used
to illustrate the usefulness of PALS for formal verification purposes.unpublishednot peer reviewe
