Boebert's Challenge Revisited

Miaomiao Zhang, Serena Fregonese, and F.W. Vaandrager. Formal Specification and Mechanical Verification of a Vehicle System. Technical Report NIII-R05XX, NIII, Radboud University Nijmegen, January 2005. To appear.

Abstract

To spur the interest of the program verification research community to consider the formal specification and mechanical verification of programs that interact with their environment, Boebert proposed - around 1979 - to consider the simple task of steering a vehicle down a straigthline course in a crosswind that varies with time. The challenge he formulated was to state formally what it means to keep the vehicle on course, and, for some particular control problem, prove mechanically that the program satisfies its high level specification. A first solution to this problem was proposed by Boyer, Green and Moore almost a decade before hybrid systems became fashionable as a research topic. In this article, we reconsider Boebert's challenge and present two solutions using modern insights from hybrid systems research and with the help of the verification tools Uppaal and PVS.

NIII report (pdf)
PVS proof
Manip strategies
PVS strategies
Uppaal model (xml)
Uppaal queries