SHF: Small: Real-Time Scheduling and Analysis of Functional Reactive Systems

使用复杂的数字系统来实时控制复杂的物理部件的速度正在迅速增长。例子包括汽车自适应制动、工业机器人装配、医疗起搏器、自动驾驶汽车旅行、远程手术、纳米结构的物理操作和太空探索。由于所有这些应用程序都直接与物理世界交互，并且经常有人参与其中，因此必须确保它们的物理安全。这些安全关键系统的正确性不仅取决于它们生成的操作，还取决于这些操作发生的时间。该项目为嵌入式控制系统开发响应时间分析技术和调度算法，实现为功能性反应程序（FRP），这是数学函数。控制器可以由单个控制组件或分布式控制组件网络组成，每个控制组件在单个或多核处理器上运行。嵌入式控制器的响应时间直接影响整个物理系统的安全性，但FRP的准确响应时间分析仍然是一个很大程度上未探索的问题。虽然有有限的特定领域的研究提供了基本的可调度性分析，使用在实现功能响应系统中使用的事务模型的响应时间的近似界限，但它们没有提供保证满足嵌入式控制器执行所施加的时间约束所需的精确时间表征。因此，这项工作为这些frp实现的控制器开发了一个精确响应时间分析，调度和热感知/节能方法的框架，以提高其性能并增强其安全性。该项目通过两个应用评估该框架对物理系统安全和性能的影响，这两个应用将需要整合所有研究活动的结果：汽车系统和航空电子设备。确定作为FRP实现的嵌入式控制器的实际响应时间将是一个技术里程碑。可验证地展示这些调度技术如何增强物理系统的安全性和性能将是另一个问题。通过提高嵌入式控制系统的安全性和性能，同时降低其在航空航天、医药、通信、汽车、纳米制造、工业加工和太空探索等领域的实施成本，该项目具有广泛的社会影响。该项目培养多样化的本科生和研究生，让他们在一流的城市大学进行研究，这些大学的毕业生通常会加入当地的能源相关/高科技行业、美国宇航局的约翰逊航天中心和世界知名的德克萨斯医疗中心。新发现的技术将被纳入嵌入式/实时系统和操作系统的本科和研究生课程。项目结果将包括在PI的下一版流行教科书“实时系统：调度，分析和验证”（Wiley）和新教科书“嵌入式编程”中。计划的研究活动将产生各种研究论文和硬件/软件工具，以解决项目的各个方面。实现的工具将随时可供下载。

The use of sophisticated digital systems to control complex physical components in real-time has grown at a rapid pace. Examples include automobile adaptive braking, industrial robotic assembly, medical pacemakers, autonomous vehicular travel, remote surgery, physical manipulation of nano-structures, and space exploration. Since all these applications interact directly with the physical world and often have humans in the loop, their physical safety must be ensured. The correctness of these safety-critical systems depends not only on the actions they generate, but also on the time at which these actions occur. This project develops response time analysis techniques and scheduling algorithms for embedded control systems implemented as functional reactive programs (FRP's), which are mathematical functions. The controller may consist of a single control component or a network of distributed control components, each running on single or multi-core processors. The response time of the embedded controller has a direct impact on the safety of the entire physical system, but accurate response time analysis of FRP's remains a largely unexplored problem. While there are limited domain-specific studies that provide basic schedulability analysis using approximate bounds on the response time of the transactional model used in implementing functional reactive systems, they do not provide the exact timing characterization needed to guarantee satisfaction of the timing constraints imposed on the execution of the embedded controller. Thus this work develops a framework for accurate response time analysis, scheduling, and thermal-aware/power-conserving methods for these FRP-implemented controllers to improve their performance and enhance their safety.This project evaluates the impact of this framework on physical system safety and performance using two applications that will require integrating the results of all the research activities: automotive systems and avionics. Determining actual response times of embedded controllers implemented as FRP's will be a technical milestone. Verifiably showing how these scheduling techniques enhance physical system safety and performance will be another. By improving the safety and performance of embedded control systems while reducing the cost of their implementation in domains such as aerospace, medicine, communication, automotive, nano-fabrication, industrial processing, and space exploration, the project has broad societal impact. This project educates diverse undergraduate and graduate students to perform research in a top-tier urban university whose graduates often join local energy-related/high-tech industries, NASA's Johnson Space Center, and the world-renowned Texas Medical Center. Novel techniques discovered will be incorporated into the undergraduate and graduate courses in embedded/real-time systems and operating systems. Project results will be included in the next edition of the PI's popular textbook titled "Real-Time Systems: Scheduling, Analysis, and Verification" (Wiley) and in a new textbook titled "Embedded Programming." The planned research activities will generate a variety of research papers and hardware/software tools addressing the aspects of the project. Implemented tools will be readily available for download.