Physically informed assertions for cyber physical systems development and debugging

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), widely used in pervasive computing, integrate computation in the cyber world with control of physical processes. Developing CPS is challenging because interactions between physical and cyber components are complex and often unpredictable. Traditional debugging techniques can detect bugs in the cyber world, but bugs introduced from physical components and induced by limitations in the software interface to physical hardware are still difficult to detect. My research will capture the state of art and the state of the practice in verification and validation of CPS. Based on this, I will design middleware that combines models of the physical world with programming-language based assertions to help developers to design, develop, and debug robust CPS applications with ease.