Hippo: A formal-model execution engine to control and verify critical real-time systems

The design of embedded real-time systems requires specific toolchains to guarantee time constraints and safe behavior. These tools and their artifacts need to be managed in a coherent way all along the design process and need to address timing constraints and execution semantic in a holistic way during the system’s modeling, verification, and implementation phases. However, modeling languages used by these tools do not always share a common semantic. This can introduce a dangerous gap between what designers want to express, what is verified and the behavior of the final executable code. In order to address this problem, we propose a new toolchain, called Hippo, that integrates tools for design, verification and execution built around a common formalism.