CSR: Small: Collaborative Research: Safety Guard: A Formal Approach to Safety Enforcement in Embedded Control Systems

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Ensuring the safety of embedded control systems, such as the ones used in cars, is remarkably difficult as shown by the many recalled cars in recent years, causing tens of billions of financial loss each year. This project aims to improve the safety of critical components in embedded control systems by developing safety guards, a reactive component generated automatically from safety requirements and attached to the original system, to ensure the combined system is safe even if the original system violates the safety requirements. The intellectual merit of this project lies in the set of methods and tools to be developed for synthesizing safety guards of black-box systems. Specifically, this project consists of three research tasks: (a) building a benchmark suite of critical components and their safety requirements; (b) developing synthesis algorithms for constructing the finite-state machines (FSMs) of the safety guards; and (c) developing software synthesis tools for automatically generating software code that implements these FSMs. This research project will benefit a wide range of application domains, including automotive and avionics, which will be investigated through collaborations with industry. It will help improve the safety of critical components, including those based on machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques. It will simplify certification since the relatively simple safety guard can be certified against safety requirements in place of the detailed model of a critical component. And last but not the least, it will simplify the development process by allowing people to focus on functionality and performance without worrying about safety violations at the same time. The resulting software tools, together with evaluation benchmarks and experimental data, will be made available to the public. To facilitate dissemination and sharing, the project will maintain online documentations, tutorials, slides, and source code of the tool and benchmark repositories. Besides the research websites of participants at Virginia Tech and University of Southern California, the following website will be dedicated to disseminate the project results broadly: http://chaowang-vt.github.io/safetyguard/This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.