PLCverif Re-engineered: An Open Platform for the Formal Analysis of PLC Programs

Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) are widely used for industrial automation in industry and at CERN. The reliability of PLC software is crucial, but typically only testing is used to validate it. Our work targets the use of formal verification in practical ways for many years, which showed that it can be beneficial and practically applicable to various PLC programs. In this paper, we present PLCverif, our platform for formal analysis of PLC programs which has largely enhanced the quality of the deployed PLC software. By re-engineering the previous internal prototype tool, we built PLCverif to be an open, extensible platform that can be used not only for CERN’s specific PLC programs. PLCverif is licensed under an open source license, allowing the interested parties to use and extend it.