3,346 research outputs found
Disaster-Resilient Control Plane Design and Mapping in Software-Defined Networks
Communication networks, such as core optical networks, heavily depend on
their physical infrastructure, and hence they are vulnerable to man-made
disasters, such as Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) or Weapons of Mass Destruction
(WMD) attacks, as well as to natural disasters. Large-scale disasters may cause
huge data loss and connectivity disruption in these networks. As our dependence
on network services increases, the need for novel survivability methods to
mitigate the effects of disasters on communication networks becomes a major
concern. Software-Defined Networking (SDN), by centralizing control logic and
separating it from physical equipment, facilitates network programmability and
opens up new ways to design disaster-resilient networks. On the other hand, to
fully exploit the potential of SDN, along with data-plane survivability, we
also need to design the control plane to be resilient enough to survive network
failures caused by disasters. Several distributed SDN controller architectures
have been proposed to mitigate the risks of overload and failure, but they are
optimized for limited faults without addressing the extent of large-scale
disaster failures. For disaster resiliency of the control plane, we propose to
design it as a virtual network, which can be solved using Virtual Network
Mapping techniques. We select appropriate mapping of the controllers over the
physical network such that the connectivity among the controllers
(controller-to-controller) and between the switches to the controllers
(switch-to-controllers) is not compromised by physical infrastructure failures
caused by disasters. We formally model this disaster-aware control-plane design
and mapping problem, and demonstrate a significant reduction in the disruption
of controller-to-controller and switch-to-controller communication channels
using our approach.Comment: 6 page
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
Time-Optimal Path Tracking via Reachability Analysis
Given a geometric path, the Time-Optimal Path Tracking problem consists in
finding the control strategy to traverse the path time-optimally while
regulating tracking errors. A simple yet effective approach to this problem is
to decompose the controller into two components: (i)~a path controller, which
modulates the parameterization of the desired path in an online manner,
yielding a reference trajectory; and (ii)~a tracking controller, which takes
the reference trajectory and outputs joint torques for tracking. However, there
is one major difficulty: the path controller might not find any feasible
reference trajectory that can be tracked by the tracking controller because of
torque bounds. In turn, this results in degraded tracking performances. Here,
we propose a new path controller that is guaranteed to find feasible reference
trajectories by accounting for possible future perturbations. The main
technical tool underlying the proposed controller is Reachability Analysis, a
new method for analyzing path parameterization problems. Simulations show that
the proposed controller outperforms existing methods.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, ICRA 201
Synthesis of Switching Protocols from Temporal Logic Specifications
We propose formal means for synthesizing switching protocols that determine the sequence in which the modes of a switched system are activated to satisfy certain high-level specifications in linear temporal logic. The synthesized protocols are robust against exogenous disturbances on the continuous dynamics. Two types of finite transition systems, namely under- and over-approximations, that abstract the behavior of the underlying continuous dynamics are defined. In particular, we show that the discrete synthesis problem for an under-approximation can be formulated as a model checking problem, whereas that for an over-approximation can be transformed into a two-player game. Both of these formulations are amenable to efficient, off-the-shelf software tools. By construction, existence of a discrete switching strategy for the discrete synthesis problem guarantees the existence of a continuous switching protocol for the continuous synthesis problem, which can be implemented at the continuous level to ensure the correctness of the nonlinear switched system. Moreover, the proposed framework can be straightforwardly extended to accommodate specifications that require reacting to possibly adversarial external events. Finally, these results are illustrated using three examples from different application domains
Controller synthesis with very simplified linear constraints in PN model
This paper addresses the problem of forbidden states for safe Petri net
modeling discrete event systems. We present an efficient method to construct a
controller. A set of linear constraints allow forbidding the reachability of
specific states. The number of these so-called forbidden states and
consequently the number of constraints are large and lead to a large number of
control places. A systematic method for constructing very simplified controller
is offered. By using a method based on Petri nets partial invariants, maximal
permissive controllers are determined.Comment: Dependable Control of discrete Systems, Bari : Italie (2009
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