Section: Overall Objectives

Objectives

Cyber physical systems have become ubiquitous in our everyday life, ranging from simple sensors to complex systems such as consumer electronics, communication devices, process control, etc. Cyber physical systems consist of a network of heterogeneous devices. Each devices is itself composed of increasingly sophisticated hardware and software, and their development and reliability has become a key to economic success.. In the context of this project, we are particularly interested in systems that have a specific application running on dedicated hardware. Moreover we want to focus on devices that are meant to important safety constraints, such as those used in transportation industry, whether automotive, trains or aircrafts. This project is aiming at making research advances towards the development of safer and more reliable heterogeneous cyber physical systems in the selected target domain, and at reducing time to market for the development of such systems, considering both the application and the hardware parts.

The project assumes a Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approach, accompanied with Virtual Prototyping. Because a model is a formal abstraction, it is easier to apply formal methods to verify its properties. Model verification tools, reachability checks, deadlocks detection, theorem proving techniques, can be used on the models to prove system properties. However, in the end, the modeling tools usually cannot generate the entire embedded software. Proven software typically has to be integrated with libraries that are not proven. Also most applications do not run on bare hardware, but use a real time operating system that has not been certified either. Hence, in fine, it is not always clear that properties proven on the model are implemented on the final system and it is still necessary to use more traditional validation techniques. The project aims at building also executable models of the target embedded platform providing a virtual prototype of the platform. Virtual prototypes can run the application software, thus the software engineering team can develop and test the entire system.

Models also make it possible to generate conventional tests instead of manual coding. An advantage of the virtual prototyping approach is that the embedded application software can be run onto the virtual prototype and immediately tested with conventional tests.

Within the context described above, our project aims at addressing the challenges of embedded systems design with a new approach, combining modeling and formal methods, possibly code generation of application code and/or tests code, next run and validate the application code on a approximately timed virtual prototype in order to verify qualitative and quantitative, functional or non functional properties of the final system.

This approach requires the constructive combination of a virtual prototyping environment, surrounded by tools for the analysis of simulation models or simulation output, or analysis of the embedded software to make proofs of properties of the target system. We therefore need to connect modeling tools and formal methods tools with simulation tools running the real application code. We propose for that to work collaboratively towards a development platform that consists of a set of complementary components forming a tool chain in the development process, by associating technologies and tools developed both in Europe and China by three institutions, namely CWI in Netherlands, ECNU SEI in China and Inria in France.

One can distinguish two orthogonal research directions:

• developing fast and powerful simulators that can simulate platforms and offer convenient interface to the users,

• connected to specific tools, the goal of which is to verify required properties of the system.

The first action is mostly relevant to simulation research to accelerate or parallelize the simulation. The second is related to usage of formal methods, as adjunct tools to the previous one.