Using HyTech to Verify an Automotive Control System

This paper shows how HyTech, a symbolic model checker for linear hybrid systems, can be used to verify a part of an abstracted automotive control system. The system controls the height of an automobile by a pneumatic suspension system and has been proposed by BMW AG as a case study taken from a current industrial development. For a system which controls one wheel we verify safety properties, such as that the height of the car maintains within desired bounds or that the height is not changed in curves, by reachability analysis. Furthermore, a property related to stability in the sense of control theory is veriied. We believe that the case study can serve as a real-life benchmark problem for the formal analysis of embedded reactive systems.