Cheryl A. Williams

Verifying Code Automatically Generated From an Executable Model

Currently in the automotive industry, most software source code is manually generated (i.e., hand written). This manually generated code is written to satisfy requirements that are generally specified or captured in an algorithm document. However, this process can be very error prone since errors can be introduced during the manual translation of the algorithm document to code. A better method would be to automatically generate code directly from the algorithm document. Therefore, the automotive industry is striving to model new and existing algorithms in an executable-modeling paradigm where code can be automatically generated. The advent of executable models together with automatic code generation should allow the translation of model to code to be error free, and this error-free status can be confirmed through testing. A three-stage process is presented to functionally verify the model, functionally verify the automatically-generated code, and structurally verify the code.