This project aims to develop innovative design automation methodologies and algorithms for software synthesis of cyber-physical systems (CPS), which have applications in key sectors such as automotive, aerospace, healthcare, and industrial automation. Software has become critical and drives future innovations for many CPS, however faces significant challenges in its development, in particular regarding the formulation, exploration and validation of timing constraints. The project results will address critical timing challenges in CPS software development, and lead to correct, predictable and efficient software implementations.
The project develops SOlSTICe, a software synthesis framework that addresses the timing challenges in CPS by quantitatively exploring timing constraints for multiple conflicting design metrics and across multiple abstraction layers, and using these timing constraints to drive the design space exploration. Building SOlSTICe includes three closely-related research themes: (1) Theme A: formulating and exploring timing contracts to co-design functionality and software architecture with respect to various design metrics (e.g., performance, security, schedulability) and to conduct hierarchical refinement across abstraction layers, (2) Theme B: exploring the generation of software tasks from functional models and the mapping of those tasks onto hardware platforms with holistic timing consideration throughout the synthesis process, and (3) Theme C: co-simulating functional and architectural models with explicit representation and evaluation of timing contracts to complement the proposed analytical synthesis algorithms.
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