Model-based Design and Validation Techniques for Smart and Safe Cyber-Physical Systems

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Motivation and Significance. Smart cyber-physical systems (CPS) will connect low-energy sensors and actuators, mobile devices and the computational power of cloud infrastructures with traditional critical embedded systems (like cars, medica devices, etc.) where a failure may result in major financial loss, severe damage or even casualties. But how can we guarantee the safety, resilience and trustworthiness of such smart and critical systems in a continuously evolving, open environment? Research Context: A smart&safe CPS needs to (i) autonomously perceive its operational context and adapt to changes in an open, heterogeneous and distributed environment with a massive number of nodes, (iii) dynamically acquire available resources and aggregate services in order to make real-time decisions, and (iv) continuously provide critical services in a safe, resilient and trustworthy way. Long-term Challenges: My research program will focus on the following long-term research challenges:(1) How to design and manage dynamically evolving smart&safe CPSs to fulfill multi-domain requirements (e.g. consistency, extrafunctional or physical)? (2) How to guarantee or validate that smart&safe CPS with multi-domain requirements deliver quality of service in an open and changing environment? Research Plan: My research program will develop innovative model-based design, management, validation and optimization techniques and tools for engineering smart&safe CPSs. Significant focus will be placed to come up with scalable solutions (applicable to industrial size systems) and incremental approaches (which exploit previously available information to make decisions) with precise semantic foundations. Research Team: This research program will contribute to the training of 6 PhD, 3 MEng and 8 undergraduate students to be carried out in an international environment. Outcome: The expected results include the (1) synthesis of consistent and large model instances with given coverage criteria to test CPS in various contexts, (2) distributed and incremental runtime monitors to detect critical situations, and (3) incremental rule-based design space exploration approaches to manage evolving CPS in a safe and optimal way. Impact: As smart devices and systems will gradually penetrate our every day life all over the world, their safety will likely be an increasing concern. Results of this research program will help guarantee that a new smart device can safely be integrated into our smart home to reduce energy consumption without undesired side effects. Connected cars may benefit from decision support provided by distributed runtime monitors to avoid accidents and traffic jams. Smart cities may increase catastrophic preparedness by using design space exploration techniques.