Taming Dr. Frankenstein: Contract-Based Design for Cyber-Physical Systems
Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Werner Damm, Roberto Passerone

Citation
Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Werner Damm, Roberto Passerone. "Taming Dr. Frankenstein: Contract-Based Design for Cyber-Physical Systems". European Journal on Control, May 2012.

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 contractbased 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).

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Citation formats

• HTML

  Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Werner Damm, Roberto
  Passerone. <a
  href="http://www.musyc.org/pubs/390.html"
  >Taming Dr. Frankenstein: Contract-Based Design for
  Cyber-Physical Systems</a>, <i>European Journal
  on Control</i>, May 2012.

• Plain text

  Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Werner Damm, Roberto
  Passerone. "Taming Dr. Frankenstein: Contract-Based
  Design for Cyber-Physical Systems". <i>European
  Journal on Control</i>, May 2012.

• BibTeX

  @article{SangiovanniVincentelliDammPasserone12_TamingDrFrankensteinContractBasedDesignForCyberPhysical,
      author = {Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli and Werner Damm
                and Roberto Passerone},
      title = {Taming Dr. Frankenstein: Contract-Based Design for
                Cyber-Physical Systems},
      journal = {European Journal on Control},
      month = {May},
      year = {2012},
      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 contractbased 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).},
      URL = {http://www.musyc.org/pubs/390.html}
  }
  

Posted by Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli on 22 May 2012.