Engineering High Assurance Distributed Cyber Physical Systems

Abstract : Distributed Adaptive Real-Time (DART) systems are interconnected and collaborating systems that continuously must satisfy guaranteed and highly critical requirements (e.g., collision avoidance), while at the same time adapt ing, smartly, to achieve best- effort and low-critical application requirements (e.g., protection coverage) when operating in dynamic and uncertain environments . This paper introduces our approach to engineering a DART system so that we achieve high assurance in its runtime behavior against a set of formally specified requirements. It describes our technique to : (i) ensure asymmetric timing protection between high-and low-critical threads (HCTs and LCTs) on each node in the DART system , and (ii) verify that the self- adaptation within, and coordination between, the nodes and their interaction with the physical environment do not violate high and low requirements. We present our ongoing research to integrate advances in model- based engineering with compositional analysis techniques to formally verify safety- critical properties demanded in safety- conscience domains such as aviation and automotive , and introduce our DART model problem that serves as an end- to-end demonstration of our integrated engineering approach.