Role of Formal Methods in the Automobile Industry

The automobile industry presents some unique challenges for the application of formal methods. The automobile industry is rapidly changing from a mechanical industry to one driven by innovation in electronics and embedded software. Many new safety and convenience features are being designed that will have higher degrees of control authority over the motion of the vehicle, leading to increasingly autonomous operation of the vehicle. To achieve robust operation of these new features in the presence of variability in traffic and weather conditions, road conditions, driver skill level, and vehicle state of health, formal methods research is needed in the areas of requirements engineering, model-driven design and model translation, hybrid system modeling and verification, distributed electrical architecture, software architecture, communication protocols (such as LIN, CAN, and FlexRay), fault tolerance, and testing. Several preliminary case studies have been conducted in some of the above areas.