Publications Details

Q: A Sound Verification Framework for Statecharts and Their Implementations

Pollard, Samuel D.; Armstrong, Robert C.; Bender, John M.; Hulette, Geoffrey C.; Mahmood, Raheel; Laros, James H.; Rawlings, Blake R.; Aytac, Jon M.

We present Q Framework: a verification framework used at Sandia National Laboratories. Q is a collection of tools used to verify safety and correctness properties of high-consequence embedded systems and captures the structure and compositionality of system specifications written with state machines in order to prove system-level properties about their implementations. Q consists of two main workflows: 1) compilation of temporal properties and state machine models (such as those made with Stateflow) into SMV models and 2) generation of ACSL specifications for the C code implementation of the state machine models. These together prove a refinement relation between the state machine model and its C code implementation, with proofs of properties checked by NuSMV (for SMV models) and Frama-C (for ACSL specifications).