Model Checking Assembly Code of an Industrial Knitting Machine

Microcontrollers are used in many embedded systems. The reliability of these embedded systems is of great importance. Model checking is seen as a promising tool for the analysis of the corresponding software. For this purpose, an on-the-fly CTL model checker for microcontroller assembly code called [MC]SQUARE was developed at the RWTH Aachen University. This paper describes a case study that was conducted using [MC]SQUARE. The aim of the case study was to model check the software of an industrial embedded system used for monitoring a knitting machine without manually modifying the code. Using model checking, we found a bug in the communication protocol of the application that was not revealed during testing.