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Formal Verification of an Industrial Safety-Critical Traffic Tunnel Control System

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Integrated Formal Methods (IFM 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11918))

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Abstract

Over the last decades, significant progress has been made on formal techniques for software verification. However, despite this progress, these techniques are not yet structurally applied in industry. To reduce the well-known industry–academia gap, industrial case studies are much-needed, to demonstrate that formal methods are now mature enough to help increase the reliability of industrial software. Moreover, case studies also help researchers to get better insight into industrial needs.

This paper contributes such a case study, concerning the formal verification of an industrial, safety-critical traffic tunnel control system that is currently employed in Dutch traffic. We made a formal, process-algebraic model of the informal design of the tunnel system, and analysed it using mCRL2. Additionally, we deductively verified that the implementation adheres to its intended behaviour, by proving that the code refines our mCRL2 model, using VerCors. By doing so, we detected undesired behaviour: an internal deadlock due to an intricate, unlucky combination of timing and events. Even though the developers were already aware of this, and deliberately provided us with an older version of their code, we demonstrate that formal methods can indeed help to detect undesired behaviours within reasonable time, that would otherwise be hard to find.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    To illustrate, Technolution also delivers commercial software written in Rust.

  2. 2.

    On a Macbook with an Intel Core i5 CPU with 2.9 GHz, and 8Gb internal memory.

  3. 3.

    Both these languages can be translated into one another, and we are actively working on mechanising these translations.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially supported by the NWO VICI 639.023.710 Mercedes project and by the NWO TOP 612.001.403 VerDi project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Wytse Oortwijn & Marieke Huisman

Authors
  1. Wytse Oortwijn
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  2. Marieke Huisman
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Wytse Oortwijn or Marieke Huisman .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Wolfgang Ahrendt

  2. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Silvia Lizeth Tapia Tarifa

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Oortwijn, W., Huisman, M. (2019). Formal Verification of an Industrial Safety-Critical Traffic Tunnel Control System. In: Ahrendt, W., Tapia Tarifa, S. (eds) Integrated Formal Methods. IFM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11918. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34968-4_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34968-4_23

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-34967-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-34968-4

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