Timed automata approach to real time distributed system verification

This article deals with a distributed real-time application modelling by timed automata. The application under consideration consists of several processors communicating via Controller Area Network (CAN); each processor executes an application that consists of tasks running under an operating system (e.g. OSEK) and using inter-task synchronization primitives. For such system, model checking algorithm implemented in a model checking tool (e.g. UPAALL) can be used to verify complex time and logical properties of the proposed model (e.g. end-to-end reponse time, state reachability, deadlock freeness). Since the proposed timed automata model contains more crucial details of the system behavior with respect to classical approaches to the response time analysis, the model checking approach provides less pessimistic results in many cases.