A Case Study: SOFL + Model Checking for OSEK/VDX Application

OSEK/VDX, a standard of automobile OS, was proposed to support the development of high-quality automotive applications. With its widely adopted, more and more automotive applications have been developed based on OSEK/VDX OS. As the continuously increasing complexity in the development of the applications, how to efficiently develop an application is becoming a challenge. A primary problem is the requirement specification may not be accurately and easily understood by the developers carrying out different tasks. The major reason is the usage of informal languages or notations in the specification. To solve this problem, formal specification provides a feasible solution. However, some difficulties (e.g., high requirement of significant abstraction and mathematical skills) has hindered the widely usage of formal methods. To address these difficulties, SOFL, a formal engineering methodology, has been proposed. In this paper, in order to investigate and study how SOFL can be used to help develop an OSEK/VDX application, we conduct a case study of cruise control system. Through the case study, we can see that SOFL specification can effectively help developer to develop an OSEK/VDX application throughout the development process.