Section: Research Program

Axis 2: Large systems

Part of the background of SUMO is on the analysis and management of concurrent and modular/distributed systems, that we view as two main approaches to address state explosion problems. We will pursue the study of these models (including their quantitative features): verification of timed concurrent systems, robust distributed control of modular systems, resilient control to coalitions of attackers, distributed diagnosis, modular opacity analysis, distributed optimal planning, etc. Nevertheless, we have identified two new lines of effort, inspired by our application domains.

Reconfigurable systems. This is mostly motivated by applications at the convergence of virtualization techs with networking (Orange and Nokia PhDs). Software defined networks, either in the core (SDN/NFV) or at the edge (IoT) involve distributed systems that change structure constantly, to adapt to traffic, failures, maintenance, upgrades, etc. Traditional verification, control, diagnosis approaches (to mention only those) assume static and known models that can be handled as a whole. This is clearly insufficient here: one needs to adapt existing results to models that (sometimes automatically) change structure, incorporate new components/users or lose some, etc. At the same time, the programming paradigms for such systems (chaos monkey) incorporate resilience mechanisms, that should be considered by our models.

Hierarchical systems. Our experience with the regulation of subway lines (Alstom) revealed that large scale complex systems are usually described at a single level of granularity. Determining the appropriate granularity is a problem in itself. The control of such systems, with humans in the loop, can not be expressed at this single level, as tasks become too complex and require extremely skilled staff. It is rather desirable to describe models simultaneously at different levels of granularity, and to perform control at the appropriate level: humans in charge of managing the system by high level objectives, and computers in charge of implementing the appropriate micro-control sequences to achieve these tasks.