Title
Taming Dr. Frankenstein: Contract-Based Design for Cyber-Physical Systems.
Abstract
Cyber-physical systems combine a cyber side (computing and networking) with a physical side (mechanical, electrical, and chemical processes). In many cases, the cyber component controls the physical side using sensors and actuators that observe the physical system and actuate the controls. Such systems present the biggest challenges as well as the biggest opportunities in several large industries, including electronics, energy, automotive, defense and aerospace, telecommunications, instrumentation, industrial automation. Engineers today do successfully design cyber-physical systems in a variety of industries. Unfortunately, the development of systems is costly, and development schedules are difficult to stick to. The complexity of cyber-physical systems, and particularly the increased performance that is offered from interconnecting what in the past have been separate systems, increases the design and verification challenges. As the complexity of these systems increases, our inability to rigorously model the interactions between the physical and the cyber sides creates serious vulnerabilities. Systems become unsafe, with disastrous inexplicable failures that could not have been predicted. Distributed control of multi-scale complex systems is largely an unsolved problem. A common view that is emerging in research programs in Europe and the US is “enabling contract-based design (CBD),” which formulates a broad and aggressive scope to address urgent needs in the systems industry. We present a design methodology and a few examples in controller design whereby contract-based design can be merged with platform-based design to formulate the design process as a meet-in-the-middle approach, where design requirements are implemented in a subsequent refinement process using as much as possible elements from a library of available components. Contracts are formalizations of the conditions for correctness of element integration (horizontal contracts), for lower level of abstraction to be consistent with the higher ones, and for abstractions of available components to be faithful representations of the actual parts (vertical contracts).
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.3166/ejc.18.217-238
European Journal of Control
Keywords
Field
DocType
Contract,cyber-physical,design methodologies,platform-based,correctness
Physical system,Simulation,Computer science,Correctness,Systems design,Design methods,Automation,Control engineering,Risk analysis (engineering),Cyber-physical system,Engineering design process,Automotive industry
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
18
3
0947-3580
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
90
4.20
21
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Alberto L. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli1113851881.40
Werner Damm21454130.44
Roberto Passerone385571.43