A SAT-based Model Checking Technique for Safety Assertions Applicable to Modern Automotive Industry

When given a model and a specification of a finite state system, model checking means to exhaustively and automatically verify whether the model meets the given specification. Model checking of temporal logic specifications for systems defined using a Kripke structure have been described for the first time by Clarke and Emerson in 1981. Since then, there exist an impressive number of research works about model checking. Our paper briefly describes the Kripke structure and the computational tree logic used in model checking. In addition, our paper presents in detail the modeling, specification and verification of two modern vehicle features, existent in the vehicle industry, including Ford Focus. The vehicle industries nowadays have a strong emphasis on the safety of the driver and the other occupants in the vehicle. Our paper presents a systematic way of verifying the seat-belt feature and the lights-on feature. To the best of our knowledge, we did not see these features verified using model checking elsewhere.