Building Adaptive, Dependable, and Secure Systems with a Cross-Layer Weakly-Hard Paradigm

Many embedded real-time systems, such as those in vehicles, mobile robots, and industrial automation, are bounded by resource constraints on computation, communication, storage, energy, etc. During the design and operation of these systems, there are often strong needs to trade off different system objectives and metrics, for adapting the systems under changing environment and operation context, retrofitting them with new features, updating them with bug fixes, or configuring them for different needs. The objective of this project is to develop a cross-layer framework that enables robust and dependable online adaptation and offline changes (retrofitting) with a weakly-hard timing paradigm. The project will use automotive electronic systems and robotic systems as primary case studies, and particularly explore leveraging weakly-hard constraints to strengthen security protection, improve fault tolerance, or enhance performance under dynamic environment and changing system needs.