Environment Modeling During Model Checking of Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract: Ensuring the safety and efficacy of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) is challenging due to the large variability of their operating environment. Model checking has been proposed for validation of CPSs, but the models of the environment are either too specific to capture the variability of the environment, or too abstract to provide counter-examples interpretable by experts in the application domain. Domain-specific solutions to this problem require expertise in both formal methods and the application domain, which prevents effective application of model checking in CPSs validation. A domain-independent framework based on timed-automata is proposed for abstraction and refinement of environment models during model checking. The framework maintains an abstraction tree of environment models, which provides interpretable counter-examples while ensuring coverage of environment behaviors. With the framework, experts in the application domain can effectively use model checking without expertise in formal methods.