2007 Science of Design (SoD) PI Meeting – Project Nuggets

1. 2007 Science of Design (SoD) PI Meeting – Project Nuggets A robust architecture for mission-critical software • Project Description and Outcomes: • Goal(s) of the project: • New foundations for building reliable embedded systems based on feedback control. • Examine and evaluate principles for structuring embedded systems software that will allow the designer to add/modify individual properties in an orthogonal manner. • Allow the human operator to restructure the system by highly automated means to achieve healing/optimization in real time. • New design paradigm relies on four cornerstones • a notion of desired behavior, which defines the set of acceptable system states, • a notion of monitoring, which can infer whether or not a system operates within those states and quantify the severity of deviations, if any, • a notion of recovery mechanism, which is capable of restoring operation to an acceptable state, and • a model which allows a principled design of the recovery mechanism and can prove its correctness. • Systems are partitioned into a critical (formally verified) core and non-critical (potentially “buggy”) components. • A dependency-algebra is designed to ensure that errors in non-critical components do not propagate to the core • This approach is applied to mission critical software. • This Work is notable because (potential contributions to the Science of Design): • it will significantly reduce the software development and deployment cost of mission-critical systems • Progress so far: Initiation implementation of a test system based on a satellite application.