Lightweight detection of physical unit inconsistencies without program annotations

Abstract

Systems interacting with the physical world operate on quantities measured with physical units. When unit operations in a program are inconsistent with the physical units' rules, those systems may suffer. Existing approaches to support unit consistency in programs can impose an unacceptable burden on developers. In this paper, we present a lightweight static analysis approach focused on physical unit inconsistency detection that requires no end-user program annotation, modification, or migration. It does so by capitalizing on existing shared libraries that handle standardized physical units, common in the cyber-physical domain, to link class attributes of shared libraries to physical units. Then, leveraging rules from dimensional analysis, the approach propagates and infers units in programs that use these shared libraries, and detects inconsistent unit usage. We implement and evaluate the approach in a tool, analyzing 213 open-source systems containing +900,000 LOC, finding inconsistencies in 11% of them, with an 87% true positive rate for a class of inconsistencies detected with high confidence. An initial survey of robot system developers finds that the unit inconsistencies detected by our tool are 'problematic', and we investigate how and when these inconsistencies occur.