6,744 research outputs found
Compositional abstraction and safety synthesis using overlapping symbolic models
In this paper, we develop a compositional approach to abstraction and safety
synthesis for a general class of discrete time nonlinear systems. Our approach
makes it possible to define a symbolic abstraction by composing a set of
symbolic subsystems that are overlapping in the sense that they can share some
common state variables. We develop compositional safety synthesis techniques
using such overlapping symbolic subsystems. Comparisons, in terms of
conservativeness and of computational complexity, between abstractions and
controllers obtained from different system decompositions are provided.
Numerical experiments show that the proposed approach for symbolic control
synthesis enables a significant complexity reduction with respect to the
centralized approach, while reducing the conservatism with respect to
compositional approaches using non-overlapping subsystems
Sequential Synthesis of Distributed Controllers for Cascade Interconnected Systems
We consider the problem of designing distributed controllers to ensure
passivity of a large-scale interconnection of linear subsystems connected in a
cascade topology. The control design process needs to be carried out at the
subsystem-level with no direct knowledge of the dynamics of other subsystems in
the interconnection. We present a distributed approach to solve this problem,
where subsystem-level controllers are locally designed in a sequence starting
at one end of the cascade using only the dynamics of the particular subsystem,
coupling with the immediately preceding subsystem and limited information from
the preceding subsystem in the cascade to ensure passivity of the
interconnected system up to that point. We demonstrate that this design
framework also allows for new subsystems to be compositionally added to the
interconnection without requiring redesign of the pre-existing controllers.Comment: Accepted to appear in the proceedings of the American Control
Conference (ACC) 201
Probabilistic Model Checking for Energy Analysis in Software Product Lines
In a software product line (SPL), a collection of software products is
defined by their commonalities in terms of features rather than explicitly
specifying all products one-by-one. Several verification techniques were
adapted to establish temporal properties of SPLs. Symbolic and family-based
model checking have been proven to be successful for tackling the combinatorial
blow-up arising when reasoning about several feature combinations. However,
most formal verification approaches for SPLs presented in the literature focus
on the static SPLs, where the features of a product are fixed and cannot be
changed during runtime. This is in contrast to dynamic SPLs, allowing to adapt
feature combinations of a product dynamically after deployment. The main
contribution of the paper is a compositional modeling framework for dynamic
SPLs, which supports probabilistic and nondeterministic choices and allows for
quantitative analysis. We specify the feature changes during runtime within an
automata-based coordination component, enabling to reason over strategies how
to trigger dynamic feature changes for optimizing various quantitative
objectives, e.g., energy or monetary costs and reliability. For our framework
there is a natural and conceptually simple translation into the input language
of the prominent probabilistic model checker PRISM. This facilitates the
application of PRISM's powerful symbolic engine to the operational behavior of
dynamic SPLs and their family-based analysis against various quantitative
queries. We demonstrate feasibility of our approach by a case study issuing an
energy-aware bonding network device.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure
Sparsity-Sensitive Finite Abstraction
Abstraction of a continuous-space model into a finite state and input
dynamical model is a key step in formal controller synthesis tools. To date,
these software tools have been limited to systems of modest size (typically
6 dimensions) because the abstraction procedure suffers from an
exponential runtime with respect to the sum of state and input dimensions. We
present a simple modification to the abstraction algorithm that dramatically
reduces the computation time for systems exhibiting a sparse interconnection
structure. This modified procedure recovers the same abstraction as the one
computed by a brute force algorithm that disregards the sparsity. Examples
highlight speed-ups from existing benchmarks in the literature, synthesis of a
safety supervisory controller for a 12-dimensional and abstraction of a
51-dimensional vehicular traffic network
Quantitative multi-objective verification for probabilistic systems
We present a verification framework for analysing multiple quantitative objectives of systems that exhibit both nondeterministic and stochastic behaviour. These systems are modelled as probabilistic automata, enriched with cost or reward structures that capture, for example, energy usage or performance metrics. Quantitative properties of these models are expressed in a specification language that incorporates probabilistic safety and liveness properties, expected total cost or reward, and supports multiple objectives of these types. We propose and implement an efficient verification framework for such properties and then present two distinct applications of it: firstly, controller synthesis subject to multiple quantitative objectives; and, secondly, quantitative compositional verification. The practical applicability of both approaches is illustrated with experimental results from several large case studies
SOTER: A Runtime Assurance Framework for Programming Safe Robotics Systems
The recent drive towards achieving greater autonomy and intelligence in
robotics has led to high levels of complexity. Autonomous robots increasingly
depend on third party off-the-shelf components and complex machine-learning
techniques. This trend makes it challenging to provide strong design-time
certification of correct operation.
To address these challenges, we present SOTER, a robotics programming
framework with two key components: (1) a programming language for implementing
and testing high-level reactive robotics software and (2) an integrated runtime
assurance (RTA) system that helps enable the use of uncertified components,
while still providing safety guarantees. SOTER provides language primitives to
declaratively construct a RTA module consisting of an advanced,
high-performance controller (uncertified), a safe, lower-performance controller
(certified), and the desired safety specification. The framework provides a
formal guarantee that a well-formed RTA module always satisfies the safety
specification, without completely sacrificing performance by using higher
performance uncertified components whenever safe. SOTER allows the complex
robotics software stack to be constructed as a composition of RTA modules,
where each uncertified component is protected using a RTA module.
To demonstrate the efficacy of our framework, we consider a real-world
case-study of building a safe drone surveillance system. Our experiments both
in simulation and on actual drones show that the SOTER-enabled RTA ensures the
safety of the system, including when untrusted third-party components have bugs
or deviate from the desired behavior
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