Automatic Inference of Finite-State Plant Models From Traces and Temporal Properties

Abstract

Closed-loop model checking, a formal verification technique for industrial automation systems, increases the richness of specifications to be checked and reduces the state space to be verified compared to the open-loop case. To be applied, it needs the controller and the plant formal models to be coupled. There are approaches for controller synthesis, but little has been done regarding plant model construction. While manual plant modeling is time consuming and error-prone, discretizing a simulation model of the plant leads to state excess. This paper aims to solve the problem of automatic plant model construction from existing specification, which is represented in the form of plant behavior examples, or traces, and temporal properties. The proposed method, which is based on the translation of the problem to the Boolean satisfiability problem, is evaluated and shown to be applicable on several case study plant model synthesis tasks and on randomly generated problem instances.