Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

We work on the problem of the safe design of real-time control systems. This area is related to control theory as well as computer science. Application domains are typically safety-critical systems, as in transportation (avionics, railways), production, medical or energy production systems. Both methods and formal models for the construction of correct systems, as well as their implementation in computer assisted design tools, targeted to specialists of the applications, are needed. We contribute to propose solutions all along the design flow, from the specification to the implementation: we develop techniques for the specification and automated generation of safe real-time executives for control systems, as well as static analysis techniques to check additional properties on the generated systems. Our research themes concern:

• implementations of synchronous reactive programs, generated automatically by compilation, particularly from the point of view of distribution (in relation with the Lustre (http://www-verimag.imag.fr/SYNCHRONE ) and Esterel (http://www.inria.fr/recherche/equipes/aoste.en.html ) languages) and fault tolerance (in relation with the SynDEx (http://www-rocq.inria.fr/syndex ) environment);

• high-level design and programming methods, with support for automated code generation, including: the automated generation of correct controllers using discrete control synthesis (in relation with Mode Automata and Signal (http://www.irisa.fr/espresso ) languages, and with the Sigali synthesis tool); compositionality for the verification, and construction of correct systems; reactive programming, aspect-oriented programming.

• static analysis and abstract interpretation techniques, which are applied both to low-level synchronous models/programs and to more general imperative programs; this includes the verification of general safety properties and the absence of runtime errors.

Our applications are in embedded systems, typically in the robotics, automotive, and telecommunications domains with a special emphasis on dependability issues (e.g. , fault tolerance, availability). International and industrial relations feature:

• an IST European FP7 network of excellence: ArtistDesign (http://www.artist-embedded.org ), about embedded real-time systems;

• an FP7 European STREP project: Combest (http://www.combest.eu/home ) on component-based design;

• an Artemisia European project: Cesar (http://www.cesarproject.eu ) on cost-efficient methods and processes for safety relevant embedded systems;

• three ANR French projects: Asopt (on static analysis), AutoChem (on chemical programming), and Vedecy (on cyber-physical systems);

• a Minalogic Pôle de Compétitivité project: OpenTLM , dedicated to the design flow for next generation SoC and SystemC;

• an Inria large scale action: Synchronics (http://www.inria.org/recherche/equipes/synchronics.en.html ) on a language platform for embedded system design.