Semantics and Analysis of Instruction List Programs

Abstract

Instruction List (IL) is a simple typed assembly language commonly used in embedded control. There is little tool support for IL and, although defined in the IEC 61131-3 standard, there is no formal semantics. In this work we develop a formal operational semantics. Moreover, we present an abstract semantics, which allows approximative program simulation for a (possibly infinte) set of inputs in one simulation run. We also extended this framework to an abstract interpretation based analysis, which is implemented in our tool Homer. All these analyses can be carried out without knowledge of formal methods, which is typically not present in the IL community.