What is UPPAAL Model Checker

Smart grids provide a digital upgradation of the conventional power grids by alleviating the power outages and voltage sags that occur due to their inefficient communication technologies and systems. They mainly tend to strengthen the efficiency, performance, and reliability of the traditional grids by establishing a trusted communication link between their different components through routing protocols. The conventional methods, i.e., the computer-based simulations and net testing, for analyzing these routing network protocols are error-prone and thus cannot be relied upon while analyzing the safety-critical smart grid systems. Formal methods can cater for the above-mentioned inaccuracies and thus can be very beneficial in analyzing communication protocols used in smart grids. In order to demonstrate the utilization and effectiveness of formal methods in analyzing smart grid routing protocols, we use the UPPAAL model checker to formally model the ZigBee-based routing protocol. We also verify some of its properties, such as, liveness, collision avoidance and deadlock freeness.