Languages and Tools for Hybrid Systems Design
Luca Carloni, Roberto Passerone, Alessandro Pinto, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli

Citation
Luca Carloni, Roberto Passerone, Alessandro Pinto, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli. "Languages and Tools for Hybrid Systems Design". Foundations and Trends in Design Automation, 1(1):1-204, 2006.

Abstract
The explosive growth of embedded electronics is bringing information and control systems of increasing complexity to every aspects of our lives. The most challenging designs are safety-critical systems, such as transportation systems (e.g., airplanes, cars, and trains), industrial plants and health care monitoring. The difficulties reside in accommodating constraints both on functionality and implementation. The correct behavior must be guaranteed under diverse states of the environment and potential failures; implementation has to meet cost, size, and power consumption requirements. The design is therefore subject to extensive mathematical analysis and simulation. However, traditional models of information systems do not interface well to the continuous evolving nature of the environment in which these devices operate. Thus, in practice, different mathematical representations have to be mixed to analyze the overall behavior of the system. Hybrid systems are a particular class of mixed models that focus on the combination of discrete and continuous subsystems. There is a wealth of tools and languages that have been proposed over the years to handle hybrid systems. However, each tool makes different assumptions on the environment, resulting in somewhat different notions of hybrid system. This makes it difficult to share information among tools. Thus, the community cannot maximally leverage the substantial amount of work that has been directed to this important topic. In this paper, we review and compare hybrid system tools by highlighting their differences in terms of their underlying semantics, expressive power and mathematical mechanisms. We conclude our review with a comparative summary, which suggests the need for a unifying approach to hybrid systems design. As a step in this direction, we make the case for a semantic-aware interchange format, which would enable the use of joint techniques, make a formal comparison between different approaches possible, and facilitate exporting and importing design representations.

Electronic downloads

Internal. This publication has been marked by the author for Chess-only distribution, so electronic downloads are not available without logging in.

Citation formats

• HTML

  Luca Carloni, Roberto Passerone, Alessandro Pinto, Alberto
  Sangiovanni-Vincentelli. <a
  href="http://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu/pubs/98.html"
  >Languages and Tools for Hybrid Systems Design</a>,
  <i>Foundations and Trends in Design
  Automation</i>, 1(1):1-204,  2006.

• Plain text

  Luca Carloni, Roberto Passerone, Alessandro Pinto, Alberto
  Sangiovanni-Vincentelli. "Languages and Tools for
  Hybrid Systems Design". <i>Foundations and Trends
  in Design Automation</i>, 1(1):1-204,  2006.

• BibTeX

  @article{CarloniPasseronePintoSangiovanniVincentelli06_LanguagesToolsForHybridSystemsDesign,
      author = {Luca Carloni and Roberto Passerone and Alessandro
                Pinto and Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli},
      title = {Languages and Tools for Hybrid Systems Design},
      journal = {Foundations and Trends in Design Automation},
      volume = {1},
      number = {1},
      pages = {1-204},
      year = {2006},
      abstract = {The explosive growth of embedded electronics is
                bringing information and control systems of
                increasing complexity to every aspects of our
                lives. The most challenging designs are
                safety-critical systems, such as transportation
                systems (e.g., airplanes, cars, and trains),
                industrial plants and health care monitoring. The
                difficulties reside in accommodating constraints
                both on functionality and implementation. The
                correct behavior must be guaranteed under diverse
                states of the environment and potential failures;
                implementation has to meet cost, size, and power
                consumption requirements. The design is therefore
                subject to extensive mathematical analysis and
                simulation. However, traditional models of
                information systems do not interface well to the
                continuous evolving nature of the environment in
                which these devices operate. Thus, in practice,
                different mathematical representations have to be
                mixed to analyze the overall behavior of the
                system. Hybrid systems are a particular class of
                mixed models that focus on the combination of
                discrete and continuous subsystems. There is a
                wealth of tools and languages that have been
                proposed over the years to handle hybrid systems.
                However, each tool makes different assumptions on
                the environment, resulting in somewhat different
                notions of hybrid system. This makes it difficult
                to share information among tools. Thus, the
                community cannot maximally leverage the
                substantial amount of work that has been directed
                to this important topic. In this paper, we review
                and compare hybrid system tools by highlighting
                their differences in terms of their underlying
                semantics, expressive power and mathematical
                mechanisms. We conclude our review with a
                comparative summary, which suggests the need for a
                unifying approach to hybrid systems design. As a
                step in this direction, we make the case for a
                semantic-aware interchange format, which would
                enable the use of joint techniques, make a formal
                comparison between different approaches possible,
                and facilitate exporting and importing design
                representations.},
      URL = {http://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu/pubs/98.html}
  }
  

Posted by Alessandro Pinto on 15 May 2006.
For additional information, see the Publications FAQ or contact webmaster at chess eecs berkeley edu.