Formal assessment of hybrid functions

It is commonly accepted in the academic community that if the use of formal methods were more widely spread and properly supported, then their use would provide substantial development time and cost benefits for the engineering of safety-critical systems. The present work builds upon an increasing imperative to improve continuously the process, methods techniques and tools for analysing the functions/behaviours allocated to hybrid systems in the chosen avionics and mechatronics technologies. Formalisation of requirements and formal expression of models remain the two major representational bottlenecks impeding the wider industrial usage. Our investigations suggest that relatively minor improvements to the prevailing industrial practices can help to overcome these bottlenecks and to start benefitting from the power of formal methods. In this paper, we present a novel method and workflow for formally analysing engineering specifications of hybrid systems that, semiautomatically, bring together requirement and domain engineering model. Both the method and workflow are validated with a case study of the Airbus A350 autobrake model.