Design Verification for Control Engineering

We introduce control engineering as a new domain of application for formal methods. We discuss design verification, drawing attention to the role played by diagrammatic evaluation criteria involving numeric plots of a design, such as Nichols and Bode plots. We show that symbolic computation and computational logic can be used to discharge these criteria and provide symbolic, automated, and very general alternatives to these standard numeric tests. We illustrate our work with reference to a standard reference model drawn from military avionics.