Section: Scientific Foundations

Main Research Directions

The overall consistency of our approach comes from the fact that the main research directions address, under different aspects, the specification and generation of safe real-time control executives based on formal models.

We explore this field by linking, on the one hand, the techniques we use, with on the other hand, the functionalities we want to offer. We are interested in questions related to:

Component-Based Design.

We investigate two main directions: (i) compositional analysis and design techniques; (ii) adapter synthesis and converter verification.

Programming for embedded systems.

Programming for embedded real-time systems is considered within Pop Art along three axes: (i) synchronous programming languages, (ii) aspect-oriented programming, (iii) static analysis (type systems, abstract interpretation, ...).

Dependable embedded systems.

Here we address the following research axes: (i) static multiprocessor scheduling for fault-tolerance, (ii) multi-criteria scheduling for reliability, (iii) automatic program transformations, (iv) formal methods for fault-tolerant real-time systems.

The creation of easily usable models aims at giving the user the role rather of a pilot than of a mechanics i.e., to offer her/him pre-defined functionalities which respond to concrete demands, for example in the generation of fault tolerant or distributed executives, by the intermediary use of dedicated environments and languages.

The proposal of validated models with respect to their faithful representation of the application domain is done through case studies in collaboration with our partners, where the typical multidisciplinarity of questions across control theory and computer science is exploited.

Component-Based Design

Component-based construction techniques are crucial to overcome the complexity of embedded systems design. However, two major obstacles need to be addressed: the heterogeneous nature of the models, and the lack of results to guarantee correction of the composed system.

The heterogeneity of embedded systems comes from the need to integrate components using different models of computation, communication, and execution, at different levels of abstraction and different time scales. The BIP component framework [5] has been designed, in cooperation with Verimag , to support this heterogeneous nature of embedded systems.

Our work focuses on the underlying analysis and construction algorithms, in particular compositional techniques and approaches ensuring correctness by construction (adapter synthesis, strategy mapping). This work is motivated by the strong need for formal, heterogeneous component frameworks in embedded systems design.

Programming for Embedded Systems

Programming for embedded real-time systems is considered along three directions: (i) synchronous programming languages to implement real-time systems; (ii) aspect-oriented programming to specify non-functional properties separately from the base program; (iii) abstract interpretation to ensure safety properties of programs at compile time. We advocate the need for well defined programming languages to design embedded real-time systems with correct-by-construction guarantees, such as bounded time and bounded memory execution. Our original contribution resides in programming languages inheriting features from both synchronous languages and functional languages. We contribute to the compiler of the Heptagon language (whose main inventor is Marc Pouzet, ENS Paris, Parkas team), the key features of which are: data-flow formal synchronous semantics, strong typing, modular compilation. In particular, we are working on type systems for the clock calculus and the spatial modular distribution.

The goal of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP ) is to isolate aspects (such as security, synchronization, or error handling) that cross-cut the program basic functionality and whose implementation usually yields tangled code. In AOP , such aspects are specified separately and integrated into the program by an automatic transformation process called weaving. Although this paradigm has great practical potential, it still lacks formalization, and undisciplined uses make reasoning on programs very difficult. Our work on AOP addresses these issues by studying foundational issues of AOP (semantics, analysis, verification) and by considering domain-specific aspects (availability or fault tolerance aspects) as formal properties.

Finally, the aim of the verification activity in Pop Art is to check safety properties on programs, with emphasis on the analysis of the values of data variables (numerical variables, memory heap), mainly in the context of embedded and control-command systems that exibit concurrency features. The applications are not only the proof of functional properties on programs, but also test selection and generation, program transformation, controller synthesis, and fault-tolerance. Our approach is based on abstract interpretation, which consists in inferring properties of the program by solving semantic equations on abstract domains. Much effort is spent on implementing developed techniques in tools for experimentation and diffusion.

Dependable Embedded Systems

Embedded systems must often satisfy safety critical constraints. We address this issue by providing methods and algorithms to design embedded real-time systems with guarantees on their fault-tolerance and/or reliability level.

A first research direction concerns static multiprocessor scheduling of an application specification on a distributed target architecture. We increase the fault-tolerance level of the system by replicating the computations and the communications, and we schedule the redundant computations according to the faults to be tolerated. We also optimize the schedule w.r.t. several criteria, including the schedule length, the reliability, and the power consumption.

A second research direction concerns the fault-tolerance management, by reconfigurating the system (for instance by migrating the tasks that were running on a processor upon the failure of this processor) following objectives of fault-tolerance, consistent execution, functionality fulfillment, boundedness and optimality of response time. We base such formal methods on discrete controller synthesis.

A third research direction concerns AOP to weave fault-tolerance aspects in programs and electronic circuits (seen as synthesizable HDL programs) as mentioned in the previous section. A first step in this direction has been the design of automatic transformation method for fault tolerance, which implement a limited (but nonetheless interesting) form of AOP .