autoC: an efficient translator for model checking deterministic scheduler based OSEK/VDX applications

The OSEK/VDX automotive OS standard has been widely adopted by many automobile manufacturers, such as BMW and TOYOTA, as the basis for designing and implementing a vehicle-mounted OS. With the increasing functionalities in vehicles, more and more multi-task applications are developed based on the OSEK/VDX OS. Currently, ensuring the reliability of the developed applications is becoming a challenge for developers. As to ensure the reliability of OSEK/VDX applications, model checking as a potential solution has attracted great attention in the automotive industry. However, existing model checkers are often unable to verify a large-scale OSEK/VDX application that consists of many tasks, since the corresponding application model too complex. To make existing model checkers more scalable in verifying large-scale OSEK/VDX applications, we describe a software tool named autoC to tackle this problem by automatically translating a multi-task OSEK/VDX application into an equivalent sequential model. We conducted a series of experiments to evaluate the efficiency of autoC. The experimental results show that autoC is not only capable of efficiently sequentializing OSEK/VDX applications, but also of improving the scalability and efficiency of existing model checkers in verifying large-scale OSEK/VDX applications.