Designing Spatially Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems under Uncertainty

Principal Investigator: Prof. Mirco Tribastone

These systems are, and will be more and more, pervasive and ubiquitous, also in safety-critical situations. Examples range from robots and drones delivering goods to self-driving vehicles and smart buildings. These systems must satisfy safety requirements, and meet performance goals. It is fundamental to keep all such requirements into account from the design phase, to reduce the cost of development and avoid dangerous situations coming from unexpected requirement violation.

Model-based engineering (MBE) of CPS is challenging due to some specific features of these systems: they act in an open physical space environment, which is subject to unpredictable changes. Hence, approaches to MBE of CPS have to explicitly take into account the uncertainty and the spatial structure of the environment in which they act. In this project, we will propose a framework in this direction, dealing with spatially distributed CPS in an uncertain environment. The framework will allow engineers to describe the system and the requirements with a high-level, UML like specification language, which will be automatically converted in a domain specific language from which a formal executable model of the system and a formalization of requirements will be extracted.