Formal platform-independent design of real-time systems

A formal approach for the development of real-time control systems is described. Our development process consists of two phases: the platform-independent phase, which includes specification programming and verification and the second phase, where execution platform considerations (i.e. resource constraints) are taken into account. This development process supports the use of end-to-end timing constraints through the whole design process without splitting them apart. A real-time application is modeled as a parallel composition of objects communicating by means of asynchronous message passing. This work concentrates on a compositional framework that combines the specification and verification of functional requirements and end-to-end timing constraints into one consistent formal model. In this paper we apply the approach to the mine pump control system. The formal analysis shows that a previously published implementation of the mine pump control system is incorrect.