A formal software synthesis approach for embedded hard real-time systems

Software synthesis is defined as the task of translating a specification into a software program, in a general purpose language, in such a way that this software can be compiled by conventional compilers. In general, complex real-time systems rely on specialized operating system kernels. However, the operating system usage may introduce significant overheads as in execution time as in memory requirement. In order to eliminate such overheads, automatic software synthesis methods should be implemented. Such methods comprise real-time operating system services (scheduling, resource management, communication, synchronization), and code generation. Formal methods are a very promising alternative to deal with the complexity of embedded systems, and for improving the degree of confidence in critical systems. We present a formal approach for automatic embedded hard real-time software synthesis based on time Petri nets. In order to illustrate the practical usability of the proposed method, it is shown how to synthesize a C code implementation using a heated-humidifier case study.