Towards a hybrid formal analysis technique for safety-critical software architectures

Given the catastrophic damage that bugs in critical systems can inflict on human life and its socio-economic environment, the use of rigorous analysis techniques while developing such systems is getting more and more important especially with the increasingly growing complexity of their architecture. However, the aforementioned growing complexity of such systems architecture leads to many scalability issues for the existing formal specification and verification approaches. This paper presents a novel and scalable formal development approach for critical system software architectures. In particular, our proposal is based on rewriting logic and combines both model checking and property-based testing techniques to bridge the gap between these complementary techniques, and hence overcome the drawbacks of previous attempts to ensure the absence of undesired or unexpected behaviour in the specification and implementation of a critical system.