Research Initiation Award: Cleopatra: A Programming Environment for Embedded Time-Critical Systems

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Predictability - the ability to foretell that an implementation will not violate a set of specified requirements - is a crucial, highly desirable property of embedded systems. This research aims at developing a programming environment (language, libraries, and tools) for building predictable time-critical systems. The backbone of the environment is CLEOPATRA, a programming language that is demonstrably well-suited for the requirements of embedded systems. CLEOPATRA features a C- like imperative syntax for the description of computation, which makes it easier to incorporate in applications already using C. It is event-driven, and thus appropriate for embedded process control applications. It is object-oriented and compositional, thus advocating modularity and reusability. CLEOPATRA is semantically sound; its objects can be transformed, mechanically and unambiguously, into formal TRA automata for verification purposes, which can be pursued using model-checking or theorem providing techniques. Since 1989, an ancestor of CLEOPATRA has been in use as a specification and simulation language for embedded time-critical robotic processes. The goal of this research goes one step further. It aims at building an integrated CLEOPATRA-based support environment that would be useful for real-time system developers, both in academia and in industry.