Experiences with the GENE-AUTO Code Generator in the Aerospace Industry

International audienceThis paper gives an overview of the most recent experimentations that Astrium and Airbus conducted with the GENE AUTO code generator during 2009. GENE-AUTO is an open source automatic and qualifiable C code generator taking as input Simulink ® /Stateflow ® and Scilab/Scicos models. It was developed in the context of an ITEA European project that ended in December 2008 (www.geneauto.org). The GENE-AUTO toolset is currently maintained by its developers and evaluated for industrial usage by several end-users. This paper presents the case studies that we used for evaluation purposes, explains the organisation between the users and technology providers with respect to the toolset maintenance and summarizes the experimentation results

Advances in Architectures and Tools for FPGAs and their Impact on the Design of Complex Systems for Particle Physics

The continual improvement of semiconductor technology has provided rapid advancements in device frequency and density. Designers of electronics systems for high-energy physics (HEP) have benefited from these advancements, transitioning many designs from fixed-function ASICs to more flexible FPGA-based platforms. Today’s FPGA devices provide a significantly higher amount of resources than those available during the initial Large Hadron Collider design phase. To take advantage of the capabilities of future FPGAs in the next generation of HEP experiments, designers must not only anticipate further improvements in FPGA hardware, but must also adopt design tools and methodologies that can scale along with that hardware. In this paper, we outline the major trends in FPGA hardware, describe the design challenges these trends will present to developers of HEP electronics, and discuss a range of techniques that can be adopted to overcome these challenges

Replicability Study: Corpora For Understanding Simulink Models & Projects

Background: Empirical studies on widely used model-based development tools such as MATLAB/Simulink are limited despite the tools' importance in various industries. Aims: The aim of this paper is to investigate the reproducibility of previous empirical studies that used Simulink model corpora and to evaluate the generalizability of their results to a newer and larger corpus, including a comparison with proprietary models. Method: The study reviews methodologies and data sources employed in prior Simulink model studies and replicates the previous analysis using SLNET. In addition, we propose a heuristic for determining code-generating Simulink models and assess the open-source models' similarity to proprietary models. Results: Our analysis of SLNET confirms and contradicts earlier findings and highlights its potential as a valuable resource for model-based development research. We found that open-source Simulink models follow good modeling practices and contain models comparable in size and properties to proprietary models. We also collected and distribute 208 git repositories with over 9k commits, facilitating studies on model evolution. Conclusions: The replication study offers actionable insights and lessons learned from the reproduction process, including valuable information on the generalizability of research findings based on earlier open-source corpora to the newer and larger SLNET corpus. The study sheds light on noteworthy attributes of SLNET, which is self-contained and redistributable

Systems engineering languages for modeling and analyzing supervisory control structures in cyber-physical systems

In today’s world, a new generation of high-tech cyber-physical systems are becoming an integral part of our societies and their impact is only going to increase within the next years. Because of their importance, the companies that develop these systems use proper systems engineering modeling tools to help with the design and development of these types of systems and to accelerate the whole development process. In this thesis, 4 very popular modeling tools/languages are being tested and evaluated in terms of their capabilities for model-based systems engineering. These tools are Simulink&Stateflow from MATLAB, Modelica, MechatronicUML and SysML. In order to do that, a proper introduction of the systems engineering process is presented to set the criteria in which the different tools/lan- guages will be evaluated. To support the evaluation process, a case study is presented with the CIF3 language that will be attempted with all the other languages/tools. Each modeling lan- guage/tool has been evaluated individually at first and then together with the others in the end. In addition to the first evaluation, a proper basic introduction of all the modeling concepts that each tool uses for modeling cyber-physical systems is provided and the building of the case study as well. After that, in the second evaluation, the languages are extensively compared against each other in terms of all the criteria set previously to see exactly the scope of capabilities that each tools has. As a result from the two evaluations, a definitive review for each language/tool is presented addressing their overall scope of capabilities, main strong features, main uses, possible ways of improving and future development.Outgoin

Model Driven Tool Interoperability in Practice

International audienceModel Driven Engineering (MDE) advocates the use of models, metamodels and model transformations to revisit some of the classical operations in software engineering. MDE has been mostly used with success in forward and reverse engineering (for software development and better maintenance, respectively). Supporting system interoperability is a third important area of applicability for MDE. The particular case of tool interoperability is currently receiving a lot of interest. In this paper, we describe some experiments in this area that have been performed in the context of open source modeling efforts. Taking stock of these achievements, we propose a general framework where various tools are associated to implicit or explicit metamodels. One of the interesting properties of such an organization is that it allows designers starting some software engineering activity with an informal light-weight tool and carrying it out later on in a more complete or formal context. We analyze such situations and discuss the advantages of using MDE to build a general tool interoperability framework

Systematic Model-based Design Assurance and Property-based Fault Injection for Safety Critical Digital Systems

With advances in sensing, wireless communications, computing, control, and automation technologies, we are witnessing the rapid uptake of Cyber-Physical Systems across many applications including connected vehicles, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, smart homes etc. Many of these applications are safety-critical in nature and they depend on the correct and safe execution of software and hardware that are intrinsically subject to faults. These faults can be design faults (Software Faults, Specification faults, etc.) or physically occurring faults (hardware failures, Single-event-upsets, etc.). Both types of faults must be addressed during the design and development of these critical systems. Several safety-critical industries have widely adopted Model-Based Engineering paradigms to manage the design assurance processes of these complex CPSs. This thesis studies the application of IEC 61508 compliant model-based design assurance methodology on a representative safety-critical digital architecture targeted for the Nuclear power generation facilities. The study presents detailed experiences and results to demonstrate the benefits of Model testing in finding design flaws and its relevance to subsequent verification steps in the workflow. Additionally, to study the impact of physical faults on the digital architecture we develop a novel property-based fault injection method that overcomes few deficiencies of traditional fault injection methods. The model-based fault injection approach presented here guarantees high efficiency and near-exhaustive input/state/fault space coverage, by utilizing formal model checking principles to identify fault activation conditions and prove the fault tolerance features. The fault injection framework facilitates automated integration of fault saboteurs throughout the model to enable exhaustive fault location coverage in the model

Development of an Autonomous Aerial Toolset for Agricultural Applications

According to the United Nations, the world population is expected to grow from its current 7 billion to 9.7 billion by the year 2050. During this time, global food demand is also expected to increase by between 59% and 98% due to the population increase, accompanied by an increasing demand for protein due to a rising standard of living throughout developing countries. [1] Meeting this increase in required food production using present agricultural practices would necessitate a similar increase in farmland; a resource which does not exist in abundance. Therefore, in order to meet growing food demands, new methods will need to be developed to increase the efficiency of farming, thereby increasing yield from the present land. One way in which this problem can be solved is through the usage of autonomous aerial systems to scout for problems which could potentially affect the crop yield – such as nutrient deficiency, water stress, or diseases. Once located, this data can be used to determine the proper treatment for the field to alleviate the problem. Through this process, resources can be reduced to the required minimum, while problems affecting the crop yield will still be corrected, allowing greater production with a lower amount of resources. This project on the application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s) to the field of agriculture consisted of two phases. First, a study was conducted on the required background to define the problem statement and what solutions were available for this application. This consisted of first defining the operations within agriculture where UAV’s could be used to increase efficiency, and then the sensors, hardware, and software these operations would require. The remainder of the project consisted of evaluating the tools which could be utilized to develop such a solution. Primarily, the project focused on software tools – programming software, simulation environments, and machine learning algorithms – which could be utilized by future students to develop a functional hardware and software toolchain for the research of autonomous systems for agricultural applications. After analyzing these development solutions, a set of tools was selected which showed promise in the creation of a functional solution. It was demonstrated that the core functions required for a UAV-based agricultural solution – navigation, perception, and feature detection – could be implemented within these systems, implying that they could be integrated into a full solution. As the tools were selected to ensure the developed algorithms would be transferable to physical platforms, this additionally supports a physical system could also be developed. The present work is part of the Autonomous Systems Lab which belongs to the WKU Center for Energy Systems. The author hopes that this project contributes to the advancement of the curriculum within the engineering department and serves as a foundation for future students developing autonomous systems, perception, and applied artificial intelligence at WKU

Model-Based System Engineering and Software System Safety Workshop

The G-48 System Safety Committee sponsored a Model-Based System Engineering (MBSE) and Software System Safety (SSS) workshop, hosted by A-P-T Research, Inc. (APT) in Huntsville, Alabama, on May 2-3, 2017. The idea of this workshop evolved at the 34th International System Safety Conference (ISSC) in Orlando, Florida, during presentations and a paper by Barry Hendrix, which noted that the MBSE needs to include more system safety and software system safety processes. An action recorded under urgent-need topics by International System Safety Society (ISSS) Fellow Dave West at the G-48 meeting in Orlando resulted in volunteers to host and coordinate the workshop. The MBSE SSS workshop consisted of a panel of seven subject matter experts. Approximately 40 attendees were present and more than 70 people viewed the workshop via a NASA live video streaming feed. The MBSE SSS panel consisted of Barry Hendrix, APT; Dr. Fayssal Safie, APT; Dr. Donna Havrisik, Government Agency System Engineering; Josh McNeil, AMRDEC Software Engineering Directorate (SED); David Arterburn, University of Alabama Huntsville; Joe Hale, NASA; and Paul Gill, NASA. Many attendees were from local Redstone Arsenal agencies, such as AMCOM, PEO Missiles & Space, and the Missile Defense Agency. Several contractors from companies within Cummings Research Park also attended. Special out-of-town guests included Peggy Rogers, U.S. Navy Software System Safety Technical Review Panel (SSTRP); Bob McAlister, U.S. Air Force; and Lynece Pfledderer, Lockheed Martin (LM), along with five other LM attendees from Texas, Florida and Connecticut

The ROSACE Case Study: From Simulink Specification to Multi/Many-Core Execution

This paper presents a complete case study - named ROSACE for Research Open-Source Avionics and Control Engineering - that goes from a baseline flight controller, developed in MATLAB/SIMULINK, to a multi-periodic controller executing on a multi/many-core target. The interactions between control and computer engineers are highlighted during the development steps, in particular by investigating several multi-periodic configurations. We deduced ways to improve the discussion between engineers in order to ease the integration on the target. The whole case study is made available to the community under an open-source license