Specification and verification of fault-tolerance, timing, and scheduling

Abstract

Fault-tolerance and timing have often been considered to be implementation issues of a program, quite distinct from the functional safety and liveness properties. Recent work has shown how these non-functional and functional properties can be verified in a similar way. However, the more practical question of determining whether a real-time program will meet its deadlines, i.e., showing that there is a feasible schedule, is usually done using scheduling theory, quite separately from the verification of other properties of the program. This makes it hard to use the results of scheduling analysis in the design, or redesign, of fault-tolerant and real-time programs. This article shows how fault-tolerance, timing, and schedulability can be specified and verified using a single notation and model. This allows a unified view to be taken of the functional and nonfunctional properties of programs and a simple transformational method to be usedto combine these properties. It also permits results from scheduling theory to be interpreted and used within a formal proof framework. The notation and model are illustrated using a simple example.