Cyber-physical system design contracts (original) (raw)
Related papers
Design Contracts for Cyber-Physical Systems : Making Timing Assumptions Explicit
2012
Building Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) involves several teams of engineers with different backgrounds. We focus on interactions between control engineers and embedded software engineers. Lack of rigorous methodologies for communication and interaction between the two groups has been recognized as an obstacle to the development of dependable and cost-effective CPS. We advocate the use of design contracts as a step towards bridging this gap. Design contracts act as a medium for communication and interaction between the control and computation/communication design problems in a CPS. The contracts provide a focal point for negotiation and for decision making. Once design contracts have been established, they help to separate the global CPS design problem into two sub-problems, each of which can be tackled separately by the control-engineering and the embedded software teams, thus making the design more tractable and efficient. We propose a framework of design contracts encompassing (i) c...
Taming Dr. Frankenstein: Contract-Based Design for Cyber-Physical Systems* *
European Journal of Control
Cyber-physical systems combine a cyber side (computing and networking) with a physical side (mechanical, electrical, and chemical processes). In many cases, the cyber component controls the physical side using sensors and actuators that observe the physical system and actuate the controls. Such systems present the biggest challenges as well as the biggest opportunities in several large industries, including electronics, energy, automotive, defense and aerospace, telecommunications, instrumentation, industrial automation. Engineers today do successfully design cyber-physical systems in a variety of industries. Unfortunately, the development of systems is costly, and development schedules are difficult to stick to. The complexity of cyber-physical systems, and particularly the increased performance that is offered from interconnecting what in the past have been separate systems, increases the design and verification challenges. As the complexity of these systems increases, our inabili...
Proceedings of the IEEE, 2015
We introduce a platform-based design methodology that uses contracts to specify and abstract the components of a cyber-physical system (CPS), and provide formal support to the entire CPS design flow. The design is carried out as a sequence of refinement steps from a high-level specification to an implementation built out of a library of components at the lower level. We review formalisms and tools that can be used to specify, analyze or synthesize the design at different levels of abstractions. For each level, we highlight how the contract operations can be concretely computed as well as the research challenges that should be faced to fully implement them. We illustrate our approach on the design of embedded controllers for aircraft electric power distribution systems.
Frankenstein : Contract-Based Design for Cyber-Physical Systems ∗ g
2013
Cyber-physical systems combine a cyber side (computing and networking) with a physical side (mechanical, electrical, and chemical processes). In many cases, the cyber component controls the physical side using sensors and actuators that observe the physical system and actuate the controls. Such systems present the biggest challenges as well as the biggest opportunities in several large industries, including electronics, energy, automotive, defense and aerospace, telecommunications, instrumentation, industrial automation. Engineers today do successfully design cyber-physical systems in a variety of industries. Unfortunately, the development of systems is costly, and development schedules are difficult to stick to. The complexity of cyber-physical systems, and particularly the increased performance that is offered from interconnecting what in the past have been separate systems, increases the design and verification challenges. As the complexity of these systems increases, our inabili...
A Preliminary Study on Architecting Cyber-Physical Systems
Proceedings of the 2015 European Conference on Software Architecture Workshops, 2015
Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are deemed as the key enablers of next generation applications. Needless to say, the design, verification and validation of cyber-physical systems reaches unprecedented levels of complexity, specially due to their sensibility to safety issues. Under this perspective, leveraging architectural descriptions to reason on a CPS seems to be the obvious way to manage its inherent complexity. A body of knowledge on architecting CPSs has been proposed in the past years. Still, the trends of research on architecting CPS is unclear. In order to shade some light on the state-of-the art in architecting CPS, this paper presents a preliminary study on the challenges, goals, and solutions reported so far in architecting CPSs.
CHASE: Contract-based requirement engineering for cyber-physical system design
2018
This paper presents CHASE, a framework for requirement capture, formalization, and validation for cyberphysical systems. CHASE combines a practical front-end formal specification language based on patterns with a rigorous verification back-end based on assume-guarantee contracts. The front-end language can express temporal properties of networks using a declarative style, and supports automatic translation from natural-language constructs to low-level mathematical languages. The verification back-end leverages the mathematical formalism of contracts to reason about system requirements and determine inconsistencies and dependencies between them. CHASE features a modular and extensible software infrastructure that can support different domain-specific languages, modeling formalisms, and analysis tools. We illustrate its effectiveness on industrial design examples, including control of aircraft power distribution networks and arbitration of a mixed-criticality automotive bus.
Comprehensive design of cyber physical systems
Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on Information technology education - SIGITE '12, 2012
In recent years there has been a confluence between different fields addressing the broad field of embedded computer systems (cyber-physical systems). Traditional microcontroller-based systems have become more capable and now frequently feature 32-bit processors with networking capabilities. Single-board computers have shrunk to credit-card size and low-cost systems are available-significantly overlapping the application domain of microcontroller systems and, thirdly, mobile platforms (smartphones, tablets, e-readers etc.) also share many characteristics of these systems and overlap their design and application domains. These systems each have their own design communities, tools and standard approaches. However their commonality and overlapping application domains indicate that they share common design problems. The evolution into newer application areas also brings new problems. The situation becomes more complex when these systems are integrated into larger diverse systems. Design approaches and design problems for these different types of embedded system are reviewed. Overlapping and nonoverlapping characteristics and design issues are analyzed. A comprehensive design approach tailored to these cyber-physical systems is proposed. The comprehensive approach addresses design issues not only for all three of the overlapping fields but also systems that incorporate aspects from multiple fields. It also includes factors sometimes neglected when systems are developed within their own narrower design domains. One of the findings of this investigation is that design in this domain requires a diverse set of skills, usually only found in multidisciplinary teams. One discipline that is needed but has not traditionally contributed much in this domain is Information Technology. Another finding is that designers trained in the IT discipline with a systems-oriented approach have specific design skills that are necessary for successful design of these diverse systems.
Design by contract of cyber-physical systems driven by simulation and based on properties modeling
2017
Requirements elicitation and analysis is the basis for the successful development of a Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). The misunderstanding of one or more requirements, due to different skills and knowledge between stakeholders and engineers, could com-promise the success of an entire project with harmful consequences. Usually, agreements on the system to be delivered and related expected results are based on textual requirements with a big lack of not being computationally verifiable and difficult to trace. To this purpose, the employment of innovative engineering tools for supporting the modeling and the verification of system requirements represent a viable solution. In this context, the pa-per proposes the exploitation of a Properties Modeling (PM) approach combined with Simulation techniques as Design-by-Contract method for CPS. In particular, PM is adopted for sup-porting the definition and the representation of system requirements and constrains as computable entities, whereas ...
A Multidisciplinary Design Methodology for Cyber-physical Systems
2011
Designing cyber-physical systems is a challenge originating from the multidisciplinary and mixed-signal requirements. In order to handle this challenge, many design languages have been developed, but none is able to connect different application domains adequately. This paper proposes a new system based view for cyber-physical system design which can be easily adapted by MARTE or SysML, as it uses a model based design technique. Instead of defining another UML profile, we present an intuitive idea for the development of cyber-physical systems by refinement and introduce new abstraction layers that help to describe operating system and mixed-signal issues. Using new abstraction layers, it is now possible to support all views of the platform based design by using one consistent language. The approach explicitly distinguishes between the physical system and the computational system. The benefit of this new approach is presented in a case study where a cyber-physical system is designed.
Design tool chain for cyber-physical systems
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Design Automation Conference, 2015
Design automation tools evolved to support the principle of "separation of concerns" to manage engineering complexity. Accordingly, we find tool suites that are vertically integrated with limited support (even intention) for horizontal integratability (i.e. integration across disciplinary boundaries). CPS challenges these established boundaries and with this-market conditions. The question is how to facilitate reorganization and create the foundation and technologies for composable CPS design tool chains that enables reuse of existing commercial and open source tools? In this paper we describe some of the lessons learned in the design and implementation of a design automation tool suite for complex cyber-physical systems (CPS) in the vehicle domain. The tool suite followed a model-and component-based design approach to match the significant increase in design productivity experienced in several narrowly focused homogeneous domains, such as signal processing, control and aspects of electronic design. The primary challenge in the undertaking was the tremendous heterogeneity of complex cyber-physical systems (CPS), where such as vehicles has not yet been achieved. This paper describes some of the challenges addressed and solution approaches to building a comprehensive design tool suite for complex CPS.