Synthesizing safe control-command systems out of reusable components

Salam Hajjar (1) , Emil Dumitrescu (2) , Laurent Pietrac (2) , Eric Niel (2)

1 GIPSA-SAIGA - GIPSA - Signal et Automatique pour la surveillance, le diagnostic et la biomécanique
2 MIS - Ampère, Département Méthodes pour l'Ingénierie des Systèmes

This paper presents a safe design method for control-command embedded systems. It investigates the problem of building control-command systems out of Commercial off the shelf (COTS) components. The design method proposed uses in synergy the formal verification (FV) and the Discrete Controller Synthesis (DCS) techniques. COTS are formally specified using temporal logic and/or executable observers. New functions are built by assembling COTS together. As the COTS assembly operation is seldom error-free, behavioral incompatibilities may persist between COTS. For these reasons, COTS assemblies need to be formally verified and if errors are found, an automatic correction is attempted using DCS. The control-command code generated by DCS needs hardware specific post-processing: a structural decomposition, followed by a controllability assessment, followed by a dedicated formal verification step, ensuring that no spurious behavior is added by DCS. The resulting system is ready for hardware (e.g. FPGA) implementation.

Mots clés: Formal verification; Discrete controller synthesis; COTS; Simulation; Embedded systems; Control-command

Domaines: Energie électrique

Salam Hajjar, Emil Dumitrescu, Laurent Pietrac, Eric Niel. Synthesizing safe control-command systems out of reusable components. Control Engineering Practice, 2015, 44, pp.243-259. ⟨10.1016/j.conengprac.2015.05.006⟩. ⟨hal-01202471⟩