Section: New Results

Control for adaptive systems: Discrete control for adaptive and reconfigurable systems

Participants : Eric Rutten, Noël de Palma, Olivier Gruber, Fabienne Boyer, Tayeb Bouhadiba, Xin An.

The goal of this work is to apply control techniques based on the behavioral model of reactive automata and the algorithmic techniques of discrete controller synthesis. We adopt the synchronous approach to reactive systems, and use an associated effective controller synthesis tool, Sigali, developed at INRIA Rennes. Both are integrated into a programming language, called BZR, and its compiler, as an extension of the Heptagon language. We thus have a complete tool-supported method from control modeling down to concrete execution, considering different execution models, and targetting either software or hardware. We explore control theory for computer science, as an original alernative to computer science for control (as more usually in embedded systems), and to classical discrete control systems (as more usually applied to manufacturing). We are exploring several target application domains, where we expect to find commonalities in the control problems, and variations in the definitions of configurations, and in the criteria motivating adaptation.

We have obtained this year the following results:

• At the programming language level, we are continuing the development of a modelling and controller generation language called BZR, which involves DCS in its compilation. BZR is designed and developed in cooperation with the Pop Art and VerTecs (INRIA Rennes) teams [40] .

• We have developed a technique for designing reconfiguration controllers in the Fractal component-based framework, where discrete control loops automatically enforce safety properties on the interactions between components, concerning, e.g., mutual exclusions, forbidden or imposed sequences [29] [48] .

• We have integrated BZR with Orccad, a programming environment for real-time control systems, in cooperation with the NeCS and SED teams at INRIA Grenoble [28] .

• We are investigating administration loops in virtual machine-based distributed systems [44] , and the coordination of such loops, especially in relation with green computing problems. We are starting a new ANR project called Ctrl-Green on this topic in 2012.

• We work on the formal modelling and control of dynamic reconfiguration in FPGA circuits, in cooperation with the DaRT team (INRIA Lille) [43] and the Lab-STICC laboratory in Lorient [42] , building upon earlier work related to the MARTE framework.

• In cooperation with GIPSA-Lab and ENSI Tunis, we have adapted the discrete controller synthesis technique to the control of decentralized systems that are composed of several subsystems spread across remote sites [17] .

• In cooperation with Orange labs and GIPSA-Lab we are beginning to explore the application of discrete event systems and supervisory control to the domain of Machine to Machine and Internet of Things, with the objective to manage energy aspects; this will start with the CIFRE PhD (U. Grenoble) of Mengxuan Zhao (co-advised with H. Alla, G. Privat).