Verifying OSEK/VDX applications: An optimized SMT-based bounded model checking approach

OSEK/VDX, a standard of automobile OS, has been widely adopted by many manufacturers to design and implement a vehicle-mounted OS. Currently, with 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. Based on our previous work, in this paper we present an efficient approach to verify the developed OSEK/VDX applications. In the presented approach, SMT-based bounded model checking technique is used to carry out verification in order to handle complex applications. Moreover, a series of optimization strategies are proposed and employed to improve the checking capability of our approach. We have implemented a tool according to the proposed approach and conducted many experiments. The experiment results show that our approach is capable of checking the safety property of large-scale OSEK/VDX applications. We also compared our approach with existing checking method, the comparison results indicate that our approach is an efficient and powerful technique in verifying OSEK/VDX applications.