An efficient approach for verifying automobile distributed application systems on timing property

Haitao Zhang, Guoqiang Li, Xiaohong Li, Zhuo Cheng, Jinyun Xue, Shaoying Liu

Abstract: OSEK/VDX standard [3] has now been widely adopted by many automotive manufacturers and research groups to develop a vehicle-mounted system. An OSEK/VDX vehicle-mounted system generally runs on several processors (e.g., the system shown in Figure 1 runs on two processor), and it consists of three components: OS, multi-tasking application and communication protocol. The OS locating at a processor manages an application and conducts tasks within the application to execute on a processor, especially a deterministic scheduler (static priority scheduling policy) is adopted by the OSEK/VDX OS to dispatch tasks. The applications are in charge of realizing functions and often interact with each other via the communication protocol such as controller area network (CAN). There are two complex execution characteristics in the OSEK/VDX vehicle-mounted systems: (i) tasks within an application concurrently execute on a processor under the scheduling of OSEK/VDX OS; (ii) applications simultaneously run on the different processors and communicate each other sometimes. Due to the concurrency of tasks and simultaneity between applications, how to exhaustively verify a developed OSEK/VDX distributed application system in which applications cooperatively complete a function based on the communication protocol has become a challenge for developers with the increasing development complexity.