Research on monitoring method during the construction of safety-critical software

Abstract

The C language is widely used in aerospace and other critical areas due to its flexibility and high efficiency. However, C programs have safety risks, such as unrestricted pointer operations and lack of boundary checks for arrays and strings, which can easily lead to potential runtime faults. To address these issues, an online monitoring method for building safety-critical C programs that efficiently detects potential errors by monitoring and analysing the code in the program generation is proposed. To solve the problems of real-time compilation and verification of the online edited C program segments, a hybrid monitoring method and a technique for generating compliable versions of the segment programs are proposed. Then 43 types of error conditions are induced for 5 types of runtime errors in safety-critical software, and a rule library for error detection of online edited C program segments is constructed based on the abstract syntax trees. Finally, a syntax structure matching algorithm is proposed to implement the error monitoring of online edited C program segments. 50 commonly used C program segments from safety-critical software were selected for verification, resulting in a total of 41 matches and 146 potential runtime errors. The results show that the present monitoring method can effectively identify the potential errors and thus improve the safety and reliability of the software.

Keywords

• construction-time monitoring
• fault detection
• abstract syntax tree
• automated testing