Modeling and Verifying the FlexRay Physical Layer Protocol with Reachability Checking of Timed Automata
Michael Gerke
In this thesis, I report on the verification of the resilience of the FlexRay automotive bus protocol’s physical layer protocol against glitches during message transmission and drifting clocks. This entailed modeling a significant part of this industrially used communication protocol and the underlying hardware as well as the possible error scenarios in fine detail. Verifying such a complex model with model-checking led me to the development of data-structures and algorithms able to handle the associated complexity using only reasonable resources. This thesis presents such data-structures and algorithms for reachability checking of timed automata. It also present modeling principles enabling the construction of timed automata models that can be efficiently checked, as well as the models arrived at. Finally, it reports on the verified resilience of FlexRay’s physical layer protocol against specific patterns of glitches under varying assumptions about the underlying hardware, like clock drift.
PhD Thesis.