Modeling and Analysis of ETC Control System with Colored Petri Net and Dynamic Slicing

Abstract

Nowadays, Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) control systems have been widely adopted to smoothen traffic flow on highways. However, as it is a complex business interaction system, there are inevitably flaws in its control logic process, such as the problem of vehicle fee evasion. We find that there is more than one way for vehicles to evade fees. This shows that it is difficult to ensure the completeness of its design. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt a novel formal method to model and analyze its design, detect flaws, and modify it. In this article, a Colored Petri net (CPN) is introduced to establish its model. To analyze and modify the system model more efficiently, a dynamic slicing method of CPN is proposed. First, a static slice is obtained from the static slicing criterion by backtracking. Second, considering all binding elements that can be enabled under the initial marking, a forward slice is obtained from the dynamic slicing criterion by traversing. Third, the dynamic slicing of CPN is obtained by taking the intersection of both slices. The proposed dynamic slicing method of CPN can be used to formalize and verify the behavior properties of an ETC control system, and the flaws can be detected effectively. As a case study, the flaw about a vehicle that has not completed the payment following the previous vehicle to pass the railing is detected by the proposed method.