Handling Refinement of Continuous Behaviors: A Proof Based Approach with Event-B

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are taking a crucial role in various areas of our society and industry. Yet, because of their hybrid nature (i.e. the integration of both continuous and discrete features), their design and verification are not easy to handle, in particular when they are part of a critical system. Their certification requires to exhibit a formal argumentation that formal methods should be able to provide. This paper addresses the formal development of CPS using correct-by-construction refinement and proof based approaches. It relies on the Event-B formal method. In addition to modeling both the discrete and continuous parts of a CPS, this paper presents a novel approach in two steps. First it shows that the generic formal model we have defined, integrating both discrete and continuous behaviors, can be instantiated by various kinds of CPS. Fundamentally, continuous behaviors modeled by differential equations mingle with discrete transition systems (mode automaton), which model discrete behaviors. Here, refinement is used as a decomposition mechanism. Second, it expands the refinement operation, well mastered in the discrete world, to cover continuous behaviors. We show that different levels of abstraction of continuous aspects can be glued in a refinement chain. The proposed approach has been completely formalized using Event-B on the Rodin platform and a case study based on water tanks is used to illustrate it.