A Unified Model for Real-Time Systems: Symbolic Techniques and Implementation

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a model of generalized timed automata (GTA) with two kinds of clocks, history and future, that can express many timed features succinctly, including timed automata, event-clock automata with and without diagonal constraints, and automata with timers. Our main contribution is a new simulation-based zone algorithm for checking reachability in this unified model. While such algorithms are known to exist for timed automata, and have recently been shown for event-clock automata without diagonal constraints, this is the first result that can handle event-clock automata with diagonal constraints and automata with timers. We also provide a prototype implementation for our model and show experimental results on several benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effective implementation not just for our unified model, but even just for automata with timers or for event-clock automata (with predicting clocks) without going through a costly translation via timed automata. Last but not least, beyond being interesting in their own right, generalized timed automata can be used for model-checking event-clock specifications over timed automata models.