Passivity Degradation In Discrete Control Implementations: An Approximate Bisimulation Approach

In this paper, we present some preliminary results for compositional analysis of heterogeneous systems containing both discrete state models and continuous systems using consistent notions of dissipativity and passivity. We study the following problem: given a physical plant model and a continuous feedback controller designed using traditional control techniques, how is the closed-loop passivity affected when the continuous controller is replaced by a discrete (i.e., symbolic) implementation within this framework? Specifically, we give quantitative results on performance degradation when the discrete control implementation is approximately bisimilar to the continuous controller, and based on them, we provide conditions that guarantee the boundedness property of the closed-loop system.Comment: This is an extended version of our IEEE CDC 2015 paper to appear in Japa

Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial