Formal approach to reactive system design: unmanned aerial vehicle flight management system design example

Abstract

This paper presents a formal methodology for the design, implementation and validation of reactive systems. The methodology has been applied to the design of a Flight Management Systems (FMS) for a model helicopter in the BEAR project. POLIS, a design tool developed at the University of California at Berkeley, is extensively used. The automation of the design problem and the validation techniques provided by this tool allow to shorten prototyping time and to prove the correctness of the properties of the system. Automatic code generation guarantees error free implementation, which is fundamental in safety critical applications. Simulation of the entire design is performed using Ptolemy a hierarchical heterogeneous simulation environment.