Yes! You Can Use Your Model Checker to Verify OSEK/VDX Applications

Abstract

OSEK/VDX, a standard of automobile OS, has been widely adopted by many manufacturers to design and develop a vehicle-mounted OS. With the increasing functionalities in vehicles, more and more complex applications are developed based on the OSEK/VDX OS. However, how to ensure the reliability of developed applications is becoming a challenge for developers. As to ensure the reliability of developed applications, model checking as an exhaustive technique can be applied to verify the OSEK/VDX applications. There exist many model checkers that have been successfully applied to verify sequential software and general multi-threaded software. However, it is hard to directly use existing model checkers to precisely verify OSEK/VDX applications, since the execution characteristics of OSEK/VDX applications are different from the sequential software and general multi-threaded software. In this paper, we describe and develop an approach to translate OSEK/VDX applications into sequential programs in order to employ existing model checkers to precisely verify OSEK/VDX applications. The value of our approach is that it can be considered as a front-end translator for enabling existing model checkers to verify OSEK/VDX applications.