Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

We work on the problem of the safe design of real-time control systems. This area is related to (discrete) 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. These application domains require both formal methods and models for the construction of correct systems, as well as their implementation in computer assisted design tools, targeted to specialists of the applications. We contribute to this research domain by offering solutions all along the design flow, from the specification to the implementation: we develop techniques for the specification, the programmation and the 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 automatic distribution and fault tolerance;

• high-level design and programming methods, with support for automated code generation, including: the automated generation of correct controllers using discrete control synthesis, compositionality for the verification and construction of correct systems; reactive programming, and aspect-oriented programming;

• static analysis and abstract interpretation techniques, which are applied both to low-level synchronous models/programs and to more general imperative or concurrent 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 ), on 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 on a language platform for embedded system design;

• an Inria associated team with the University of Auckland (New Zealand), called Afmes (http://pop-art.inrialpes.fr/~girault/Projets/Afmes ) on advanced formal methods for embedded systems.