Verification of C++ Flight Software with the MCP Model Checker

The Constellation project at NASA calls for designing a crew exploration vehicle (Orion, also called CEV) and cargo launch vehicle (Ares, also called CLV). Both projects will rely on newly designed flight control software. The verification of these C++ flight codes is critical, especially for Orion, since human life will be at stake. There exist some commercial tools for the verification of C++ code. However, none of the commercially available tools does a good job at finding bugs dealing with concurrency. Yet both software for Orion and Ares are expected to be multi-threaded. With this work we are proposing to address the issue by developing a suite of tools that can be used to verify C++ code. Our tools will range from a static analyzer (based on abstract interpretation like C Global Surveyor) to a model checker (MCP, which we present in this paper) including a symbolic execution engine for test case generation (TPGEN). This paper focuses on MCP and its application to aerospace software.