Merlot: a tool for analysis of real-time specifications

Real-time systems are becoming increasingly important in the everyday life. The use of such systems for critical applications requires tools and techniques for increasing correctness and reliability of the final product. In this paper, we describe a toolset (Merlot) for analysing real-time system specifications. Merlot allows the automatic verification of temporal properties for a large set of specifications and requires interaction with the user only when the complexity of the specification overcomes a reasonable automatable level. Merlot has been built with the aim of verifying both the feasibility of the approach and the applicability of the analysis techniques to real problems, that is to identify classes of problems that can be analysed with little or no interaction with the user in a reasonable amount of time.