Parametric real-time reasoning

Rajeev Alur, Thomas A. Henzinger, Moshe Y. Vardi
1993 Proceedings of the twenty-fifth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing - STOC '93  
Traditional approaches to the algorithmic veri cation of real-time systems are limited to checking program correctness with respect to concrete timing properties (e.g., \message delivery within 10 milliseconds"). We address the more realistic and more ambitious problem of deriving symbolic constraints on the timing properties required of real-time systems (e.g., \message delivery within the time it takes to execute two assignment statements"). To model this problem, we i n troduce parametric
more » ... ed automata | nite-state machines whose transitions are constrained with parametric timing requirements. The emptiness question for parametric timed automata is central to the veri cation problem. On the negative side, we s h o w that in general this question is undecidable. On the positive s i d e , w e provide algorithms for checking the emptiness of restricted classes of parametric timed automata. The practical relevance of these classes is illustrated with several veri cation examples. There remains a gap between the automata classes for which w e know that emptiness is decidable and undecidable, respectively, and this gap is related to various hard and open problems of logic and automata theory.
doi:10.1145/167088.167242 dblp:conf/stoc/AlurHV93 fatcat:dfo6ljqo5vdszh7j6fuwpdymqe