Safety-Feature Modeling and Adaptive Resource Management for Mixed-Criticality Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract:

This project is concerned with ensuring operational safety of complex cyber-physical systems such as automobiles, aircraft, and medical devices. Modern development techniques for such systems rely on independent implementation of safety features in software and subsequent integration of these features within system platform architectures . The current trend in developing these systems, driven by the need to reduce cost and energy consumption, is to share computational resources between different features . The goal of this project is to develop techniques to predict possible interactions between features, detect them in the features' concrete implementations, and either eliminate or mitigate these interactions through precise modeling and enforcement of mixed-criticality cyber physical system semantics .

While the project is developing general purpose techniques applicable to different application domains, work concentrates on automotive systems as case studies. An industrial collaborator (not supported by NSF funds) is providing domain expertise to ensure practical applicability of results.

The project currently pursues two related research directions:

1. Modeling and Analysis of Feature Interactions Using Safety Interfaces. A safety interface combines control-level properties of a feature, which abstracts system dynamics, with timing information that characterizes externally visible modes within the feature . Such an interface enables compositional safety analysis of multiple feature, while taking into account dynamic (mode dependent) criticality levels of each feature.

2. Platform Support for Real-Time Retargetable Virtualization. Our approach leverages the recent development of RT-Xen, a real-time patch for the popular Xen virtualization platform. Timing isolation provided by RT-Xen-like platforms enables us to support middleware-aware applications, such as AUTOSAR components in the automotive domain, by ensuring location transparency and end-to-end real-time guarantees.