Horn Clauses for Communicating Timed Systems
This addresses the problem of scalable model checking for real-time systems in industrial and academic contexts, representing an incremental improvement by extending existing methods with new symbolic techniques.
The paper tackles the limited scalability and applicability of existing model checkers for timed automata by proposing a fully symbolic analysis method using Horn constraints and off-the-shelf model checkers, which is applicable to systems with large or infinite discrete state space and can handle features like Uppaal-style communication and infinite parallelism, with experiments demonstrating feasibility.
Languages based on the theory of timed automata are a well established approach for modelling and analysing real-time systems, with many applications both in industrial and academic context. Model checking for timed automata has been studied extensively during the last two decades; however, even now industrial-grade model checkers are available only for few timed automata dialects (in particular Uppaal timed automata), exhibit limited scalability for systems with large discrete state space, or cannot handle parametrised systems. We explore the use of Horn constraints and off-the-shelf model checkers for analysis of networks of timed automata. The resulting analysis method is fully symbolic and applicable to systems with large or infinite discrete state space, and can be extended to include various language features, for instance Uppaal-style communication/broadcast channels and BIP-style interactions, and systems with infinite parallelism. Experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the method.