Automatically verifying an object-oriented specification of the Steam-Boiler system

Correctness is a desired property of industrial software systems. Although the employment of formal methods and their verification techniques in embedded real-time systems has started to be a common practice, the same cannot be said about object-oriented software. This paper presents an experiment of a technique for the automated verification of a subset of the object-oriented language OBject LOGic (OBLOG). In our setting, object-oriented models are automatically translated to LOTOS specifications using a programmable rule-based engine included in the Development Environment of the OBLOG language. The resulting specifications are then verified by model-checking using the CADP tool-box. To illustrate the concept we develop and verify an object-oriented specification of a well-known case study—the Steam-Boiler Control System.