CPS: Breakthrough: Collaborative Research: A Framework for Extensibility-Driven Design of Cyber-Physical Systems

Project: Research project

Project Details

Description

A longstanding problem in the design of CPSs is the inability and ineffectiveness in coping with software and hardware evolutions over the lifetime of a design or across multiple versions in the same product family. A fundamental reason for this is that small changes in resource usage can cause big and unexpected changes in timing and ultimately affect the functionality of the design. Engineers need to ensure that any changes not only (1) meet the constraints of the embedded platform such as schedulability and power constraints, but also (2) preserve the correctness of functional properties, many of which are affected by the platform changes. Systems that are designed without future changes in mind often incur significant redesign and re-verification cost, and reduced system availability and reliability. We argue that we need to treat extensibility as a first-class design objective, and address it with a holistic consideration of functional properties and platform implementation. The objective of this project is to develop a systematic framework for designing extensible cyber-physical systems that can enable efficient and correct updates with minimal redesign and re-verification efforts. We envision an extensibility-driven design (EDD) flow where different models and metrics of extensibility are considered jointly with other objectives at design time, further supported by new synthesis and verification tools that can reason about design updates efficiently. Additionally, EDD will provide the following capabilities: (1) At the initial design stage, EDD identifies certain constraints (e.g., timing) that are critical for functional correctness, and explores the design space to maximize the amount of future software and hardware changes that can be made without violating these constraints. (2) During design updates, EDD first determines whether it is possible to accommodate the updates through software architecture re-synthesis, so as to avoid costly re-verification. In the cases where the updates violate existing platform and requirement constraints, EDD selectively modifies some of them to explore feasible changes while minimizing re-verification efforts.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date1/2/188/31/20

Funding

  • National Science Foundation (CCF-1834324)

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