Title
Leveraging Abstraction to Establish Out-of-Nominal Safety Properties.
Abstract
Digital systems in an out-of-nominal environment (e.g., one causing hardware bit flips) may not be expected to function correctly in all respects but may be required to fail safely. We present an approach for understanding and verifying a system's out-of-nominal behavior as an abstraction of nominal behavior that preserves designated critical safety requirements. Because abstraction and refinement are already widely used for improved tractability in formal design and proof techniques, this additional way of viewing an abstraction can potentially verify a system's out-of-nominal safety with little additional work. We illustrate the approach with a simple model of a turnstile controller with possible logic faults (formalized in the temporal logic of actions and NuSMV), noting how design choices can be guided by the desired out-of-nominal abstraction. Principles of robustness in complex systems (specifically, Boolean networks) are found to be compatible with the formal abstraction approach. This work indicates a direction for broader use of formal methods in safety-critical systems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1007/978-3-319-29510-7_10
Communications in Computer and Information Science
Keywords
Field
DocType
Abstraction,Refinement,Model checking,Fault tolerance,Soft errors,Temporal logic of actions,NuSMV
Complex system,Control theory,Programming language,Temporal logic of actions,Abstraction,Model checking,Computer science,Robustness (computer science),Fault tolerance,Formal methods,Reliability engineering
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
596
1865-0929
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jackson Mayo1437.97
Robert C. Armstrong210021.51
Geoffrey C. Hulette363.88