Astrée: From Research to Industry

Airbus has started introducing abstract interpretation based static analysers into the verification process of some of its avionics software products. Industrial constraints require any such tool to be extremely precise, which can only be achieved after a twofold specialisation process: first, it must be designed to verify a class of properties for a family of programs efficiently; second, it must be parametric enough for the user to be able to fine tune the analysis of any particular program of the family. This implies a close cooperation between the tool-providers and the end-users. Astrée is such a static analyser: it produces only a small number of false alarms when attempting to prove the absence of run-time errors in control/command programs written in C, and provides the user with enough options and directives to help reduce this number down to zero. Its specialisation process has been reported in several scientific papers, such as [1] and [2]. Through the description of analyses performed with Astrée on industrial programs, we give an overview of the false alarm reduction process from an engineering point of view, and sketch a possible customer-supplier relationship model for the emerging market for static analysers.