Runtime Verification of Domain-Specific Models of Physical Characteristics in Control Software

Control logic of embedded systems is nowadays largely implemented in software. Such control software implements, among others, models of physical characteristics, like heat exchange among system components. Due to evolution of system properties and increasing complexity, faults can be left undetected in these models. Therefore, their accuracy must be verified at runtime. Traditional runtime verification techniques that are based on states and/or events in software execution are inadequate in this case. The behavior suggested by models of physical characteristics cannot be mapped to behavioral properties of software. Moreover, implementation in a general-purpose programming language makes these models hard to locate and verify. This paper presents a novel approach to explicitly specify models of physical characteristics using a domain-specific language, to define monitors for inconsistencies by detecting and exploiting redundancy in these models, and to realize these monitors using an aspect-oriented approach. The approach is applied to two industrial case studies.