Object-oriented specification and formal verification of real-time systems

An object-oriented approach for specification and verification of real-time systems is described in this paper. It is motivated by taking advantage of object-oriented techniques to produce real-time software that is easy to understand, maintain, and reuse. The approach specifies the structural, behavioral, and control aspects of objects in one model with a textual representation as well as a graphical representation. For ease to comprehend and use, the model encapsulates object states and allows an analyst to focus on specifying object operations one at a time. System behavior from individual objects can be deduced and analyzed. For safety considerations, the approach supports specification of failures to object behavior and their resultant faults. The approach also supports modeling of timed temporal constraints for specifying and verifying desirable real-time properties. An object timed temporal logic OTTL is defined for expressing the syntax and semantics of these constraints. Decision procedures for their verification are also presented.