CAREER: SOlSTICe: Software Synthesis with Timing Contracts for Cyber-Physical Systems

该项目旨在为网络物理系统（CPS）的软件合成开发创新的设计自动化方法和算法，这些方法和算法在汽车、航空航天、医疗保健和工业自动化等关键领域都有应用。软件已成为许多此类系统未来创新的关键，但在其发展中面临重大挑战，特别是关于时间约束的制定、探索和验证。该项目的结果将解决CPS软件开发中的关键时间挑战，并导致正确、可预测和高效的软件实现。除了通过出版物和研讨会传播研究成果外，PI还将与行业伙伴合作，将研究成果转化为实践。利用这些研究活动，PI将开发一个综合教育计划，重点关注K-12，本科生和研究生的跨学科教育，通过乐高头脑风暴实验室开发和竞赛组织，新的CPS课程开发和教科书编写。该项目将开发一个软件综合框架，通过定量地探索多个冲突设计度量和跨多个抽象层的时间约束来解决CPS中的时间挑战，并使用这些时间约束来驱动设计空间探索。制定框架包括三个密切相关的研究主题：(1)根据各种设计指标（例如，性能、安全性、可调度性）制定和探索时序契约，以协同设计功能和软件架构，并跨抽象层进行分层优化；(2)探索从功能模型生成软件任务，并在整个合成过程中考虑整体时序，将这些任务映射到硬件平台上；(3)协同模拟功能和架构模型，明确表示和评估时序契约，以补充所提出的分析综合算法。

This project aims to develop innovative design automation methodologies and algorithms for software synthesis of cyber-physical systems (CPS), which have applications in key sectors such as automotive, aerospace, healthcare, and industrial automation. Software has become critical and drives future innovations for many such systems, but faces significant challenges in its development, in particular regarding the formulation, exploration and validation of timing constraints. The results from this project will address critical timing challenges in CPS software development, and lead to correct, predictable and efficient software implementations. In addition to disseminating the results through publications and workshops, the PI will collaborate with industry partners on transitioning the research findings into practice. Leveraging the research activities, the PI will develop an integrated education program that focuses on the interdisciplinary education of K-12, undergraduate and graduate students, through Lego Mindstorms labs development and contest organization, new CPS course development, and textbook writing. The project will develop, a software synthesis framework that addresses the timing challenges in CPS by quantitatively exploring timing constraints for multiple conflicting design metrics and across multiple abstraction layers, and using these timing constraints to drive the design space exploration. Developing the framework includes three closely-related research themes: (1) formulating and exploring timing contracts to co-design functionality and software architecture with respect to various design metrics (e.g., performance, security, schedulability) and to carry out hierarchical refinement across abstraction layers, (2) exploring the generation of software tasks from functional models and the mapping of those tasks onto hardware platforms with holistic timing consideration throughout the synthesis process, and (3) co-simulating functional and architectural models with explicit representation and evaluation of timing contracts to complement the proposed analytical synthesis algorithms.