101,877 research outputs found
Integrated Design and Implementation of Embedded Control Systems with Scilab
Embedded systems are playing an increasingly important role in control
engineering. Despite their popularity, embedded systems are generally subject
to resource constraints and it is therefore difficult to build complex control
systems on embedded platforms. Traditionally, the design and implementation of
control systems are often separated, which causes the development of embedded
control systems to be highly time-consuming and costly. To address these
problems, this paper presents a low-cost, reusable, reconfigurable platform
that enables integrated design and implementation of embedded control systems.
To minimize the cost, free and open source software packages such as Linux and
Scilab are used. Scilab is ported to the embedded ARM-Linux system. The drivers
for interfacing Scilab with several communication protocols including serial,
Ethernet, and Modbus are developed. Experiments are conducted to test the
developed embedded platform. The use of Scilab enables implementation of
complex control algorithms on embedded platforms. With the developed platform,
it is possible to perform all phases of the development cycle of embedded
control systems in a unified environment, thus facilitating the reduction of
development time and cost.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures; Open Access at
http://www.mdpi.org/sensors/papers/s8095501.pd
Sciduction: Combining Induction, Deduction, and Structure for Verification and Synthesis
Even with impressive advances in automated formal methods, certain problems
in system verification and synthesis remain challenging. Examples include the
verification of quantitative properties of software involving constraints on
timing and energy consumption, and the automatic synthesis of systems from
specifications. The major challenges include environment modeling,
incompleteness in specifications, and the complexity of underlying decision
problems.
This position paper proposes sciduction, an approach to tackle these
challenges by integrating inductive inference, deductive reasoning, and
structure hypotheses. Deductive reasoning, which leads from general rules or
concepts to conclusions about specific problem instances, includes techniques
such as logical inference and constraint solving. Inductive inference, which
generalizes from specific instances to yield a concept, includes algorithmic
learning from examples. Structure hypotheses are used to define the class of
artifacts, such as invariants or program fragments, generated during
verification or synthesis. Sciduction constrains inductive and deductive
reasoning using structure hypotheses, and actively combines inductive and
deductive reasoning: for instance, deductive techniques generate examples for
learning, and inductive reasoning is used to guide the deductive engines.
We illustrate this approach with three applications: (i) timing analysis of
software; (ii) synthesis of loop-free programs, and (iii) controller synthesis
for hybrid systems. Some future applications are also discussed
Inferring Energy Bounds via Static Program Analysis and Evolutionary Modeling of Basic Blocks
The ever increasing number and complexity of energy-bound devices (such as
the ones used in Internet of Things applications, smart phones, and mission
critical systems) pose an important challenge on techniques to optimize their
energy consumption and to verify that they will perform their function within
the available energy budget. In this work we address this challenge from the
software point of view and propose a novel parametric approach to estimating
tight bounds on the energy consumed by program executions that are practical
for their application to energy verification and optimization. Our approach
divides a program into basic (branchless) blocks and estimates the maximal and
minimal energy consumption for each block using an evolutionary algorithm. Then
it combines the obtained values according to the program control flow, using
static analysis, to infer functions that give both upper and lower bounds on
the energy consumption of the whole program and its procedures as functions on
input data sizes. We have tested our approach on (C-like) embedded programs
running on the XMOS hardware platform. However, our method is general enough to
be applied to other microprocessor architectures and programming languages. The
bounds obtained by our prototype implementation can be tight while remaining on
the safe side of budgets in practice, as shown by our experimental evaluation.Comment: Pre-proceedings paper presented at the 27th International Symposium
on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2017), Namur,
Belgium, 10-12 October 2017 (arXiv:1708.07854). Improved version of the one
presented at the HIP3ES 2016 workshop (v1): more experimental results (added
benchmark to Table 1, added figure for new benchmark, added Table 3),
improved Fig. 1, added Fig.
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