Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

FM4CPS

• Title: Formal Models and tools for Cyber-Physical Systems

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • ECNU (China) - Artificial Intelligence Lab - Jifeng He

• Start year: 2015

• See also: https://project.inria.fr/fm4cps/

• Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and the connected Internet of Things (IoT) are inherently heterogeneous systems, with ("cyber") computer digital parts interacting with their physical sensible environment, under user requirements for functional and temporal correctness. Thus, design of such systems as a whole requires a diversity of models, and the behavior orchestration between such models must be carefully defined and analyzed.

  FM4CPS will address several facets of Formal Model-Driven Engineering for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things. The design of such large heterogeneous systems calls for hybrid modeling, and the combination of classes of models, most previously well-established in their own restricted area: Formal Models of Computations drawn from Concurrency Theory for the “cyber” discrete processors, timed extension and continuous behaviors for physical environments, requirement models and user constraints extended to non-functional aspects, new challenges for designing and analyzing large and highly dynamic communicating software entities. Orchestration and comparison of models, with their expressive power vs. their decidable aspects, shall be considered with the point of view of hybrid/heterogeneous modeling here. Main aspects are the various timing or quantitative structure extensions relying for instance on a hybrid logical clock model for the orchestration of underlying components.

  The associated team aims at various level of research, from formal models, semantics, or complexity, to experimental tools development. This will start for example on one side with building a formal orchestration model for CPSs, based on an hybrid clock model that combine discrete and physical time, synchronous and asynchronous computations or communications. Another goal will be the study of expressiveness and decidability for CPS, based on dedicated sub-families of well-structured push-down systems, addressing both unbounded communication and time-sensitive models.

  Beyond their own expertise in this field, the partners will build on the results of previous cooperations in the context of the Liama projects Hades and Tempo, and the associated team DAESD. The current proposal widely broadens the domain of collaboration, and with the inclusion, for the first time, of Jiao Tong University. We expect this is the first step towards the extension of LIAMA in Shanghai with the strengthening of the involvement of E.C.N.U., and the contribution of new top notch universities such as Jiaotong.

We have signed an agreement with the University of Verona, which covers joint activities (see section 6.7, together with the housing of interns.