Section: New Results

Heterogeneous Systems

Participants : Eric Badouel, Albert Benveniste, Timothy Bourke, Benoît Caillaud.

Hybrid Modeling

Hybrid modeling tools like Simulink have evolved from simulation platforms into development platforms on which testing, verification and code generation are also performed. It is critical to ensure that the results of simulation, compilation and verification are consistent. Synchronous languages have addressed these issues but only for discrete systems. Reprising earlier work  [32] , we present in [21] a hybrid modeler built from a synchronous language and an of-the-shelf numerical solver. The main novelty is a language with hierarchical automata that can be arbitrarily mixed with data-flow and ordinary differential equations (ODEs). A type system statically ensures that discrete state changes are aligned with zero-crossing events and that the function passed to the numerical solver has no side-effects during integration. Well-typed programs are compiled by source-to-source translation into synchronous code which is then translated into sequential code using an existing synchronous language compiler.

Starting from a minimal, yet full-featured, Lustre-like synchronous language, we present in [22] a conservative extension where data-flow equations can be mixed with ordinary differential equations (ODEs) with possible reset. A type system is proposed to statically distinguish discrete computations from continuous ones and to ensure that signals are used in their proper domains. We propose a semantics based on non-standard analysis which gives a synchronous interpretation to the whole language, clarifies the discrete/continuous interaction and the treatment of zero-crossings, and also allows the correctness of the type system to be established. The extended data-flow language is realized through a source-to-source transformation into a synchronous subset, which can then be compiled using existing tools into routines that are both efficient and bounded in their use of memory. These routines are orchestrated with a single off-the-shelf numerical solver using a simple but precise algorithm which treats causally-related cascades of zero-crossings. We have validated the viability of the approach through experiments with the Sundials library.

Distributed Structured Documents

Evaluation of attributes w.r.t. an attribute grammar can be obtained by inductively computing a function expressing the dependencies of the synthesized attributes on inherited attributes. This higher-order functional approach to attribute grammars leads to a straightforward implementation using a higher-order lazy functional language like Haskell. The resulting evaluation functions are, however, not easily amenable to optimization rules. We present in [12] an alternative first-order functional interpretation of attribute grammars where the input tree is replaced with an extended cyclic tree each node of which is aware of its context viewed as an additional child tree. By the way, we demonstrate that these cyclic representations of zippers (trees with their context) are natural generalizations of doubly-linked lists to trees over an arbitrary signature.