CPS: Small: Compositionality and Reconfiguration for Distributed Hybrid Systems
Lead PI:
Andre Platzer
Co-PI:
Abstract
The objective of this research is to address fundamental challenges in the verification and analysis of reconfigurable distributed hybrid control systems. These occur frequently whenever control decisions for a continuous plant depend on the actions and state of other participants. They are not supported by verification technology today. The approach advocated here is to develop strictly compositional proof-based verification techniques to close this analytic gap in cyber-physical system design and to overcome scalability issues. This project develops techniques using symbolic invariants for differential equations to address the analytic gap between nonlinear applications and present verification techniques for linear dynamics. This project aims at transformative research changing the scope of systems that can be analyzed. The proposed research develops a compositional proof-based approach to hybrid systems verification in contrast to the dominant automata-based verification approaches. It represents a major improvement addressing the challenges of composition, reconfiguration, and nonlinearity in system models The proposed research has significant applications in the verification of safety-critical properties in next generation cyber-physical systems. This includes distributed car control, robotic swarms, and unmanned aerial vehicle cooperation schemes to full collision avoidance protocols for multiple aircraft. Analysis tools for distributed hybrid systems have a broad range of applications of varying degrees of safety-criticality, validation cost, and operative risk. Analytic techniques that find bugs or ensure correct functioning can save lives and money, and therefore are likely to have substantial economic and societal impact.
Andre Platzer

André Platzer is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. He develops the Logical Foundations of Cyber-Physical Systems (NSF CAREER). In his research, André Platzer works on logic-based verification and validation techniques for various forms of cyber-physical systems, including hybrid systems, distributed hybrid systems, and stochastic hybrid systems. He developed differential dynamic logic and differential invariants and leads the development of the CPS verification tool KeYmaera X.

André Platzer received an ACM Doctoral Dissertation Honorable Mention Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and was named one of the Brilliant 10 Young Scientists by the Popular Science magazine 2009 and one of the AI's 10 to Watch 2010 by the IEEE Intelligent Systems Magazine.

Performance Period: 09/01/2009 - 08/31/2014
Institution: Carnegie-Mellon University
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Award Number: 0931985
Project URL