No Arabic abstract
Safety-critical distributed cyber-physical systems (CPSs) have been found in a wide range of applications. Notably, they have displayed a great deal of utility in intelligent transportation, where autonomous vehicles communicate and cooperate with each other via a high-speed communication network. Such systems require an ability to identify maneuvers in real-time that cause dangerous circumstances and ensure the implementation always meets safety-critical requirements. In this paper, we propose a real-time decentralized reachability approach for safety verification of a distributed multi-agent CPS with the underlying assumption that all agents are time-synchronized with a low degree of error. In the proposed approach, each agent periodically computes its local reachable set and exchanges this reachable set with the other agents with the goal of verifying the system safety. Our method, implemented in Java, takes advantages of the timing information and the reachable set information that are available in the exchanged messages to reason about the safety of the whole system in a decentralized manner. Any particular agent can also perform local safety verification tasks based on their local clocks by analyzing the messages it receives. We applied the proposed method to verify, in real-time, the safety properties of a group of quadcopters performing a distributed search mission.
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) pose new challenges to verification and validation that go beyond the proof of functional correctness based on high-level models. Particular challenges are, in particular for formal methods, its heterogeneity and scalability. For numerical simulation, uncertain behavior can hardly be covered in a comprehensive way which motivates the use of symbolic methods. The paper describes an approach for symbolic simulation-based verification of CPS with uncertainties. We define a symbolic model and representation of uncertain computations: Affine Arithmetic Decision Diagrams. Then we integrate this approach in the SystemC AMS simulator that supports simulation in different models of computation. We demonstrate the approach by analyzing a water-level monitor with uncertainties, self-diagnosis, and error-reactions.
Cyber-Physical Systems~(CPS) consist of collaborative, networked and tightly intertwined computational (logical) and physical components, each operating at different spatial and temporal scales. Hence, the spatial and temporal requirements play an essential role for their correct and safe execution. Furthermore, the local interactions among the system components result in global spatio-temporal emergent behaviors often impossible to predict at the design time. In this work, we pursue a complementary approach by introducing STREL a novel spatio-temporal logic that enables the specification of spatio-temporal requirements and their monitoring over the execution of mobile and spatially distributed CPS. Our logic extends the Signal Temporal Logic with two novel spatial operators reach and escape from which is possible to derive other spatial modalities such as everywhere, somewhere and surround. These operators enable a monitoring procedure where the satisfaction of the property at each location depends only on the satisfaction of its neighbours, opening the way to future distributed online monitoring algorithms. We propose both a qualitative and quantitative semantics based on constraint semirings, an algebraic structure suitable for constraint satisfaction and optimisation. We prove that, for a subclass of models, all the spatial properties expressed with reach and escape, using euclidean distance, satisfy all the model transformations using rotation, reflection and translation. Finally, we provide an offline monitoring algorithm for STREL and, to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we show its application using the monitoring of a simulated mobile ad-hoc sensor network as running example.
Rational verification is the problem of determining which temporal logic properties will hold in a multi-agent system, under the assumption that agents in the system act rationally, by choosing strategies that collectively form a game-theoretic equilibrium. Previous work in this area has largely focussed on deterministic systems. In this paper, we develop the theory and algorithms for rational verification in probabilistic systems. We focus on concurrent stochastic games (CSGs), which can be used to model uncertainty and randomness in complex multi-agent environments. We study the rational verification problem for both non-cooperative games and cooperative games in the qualitative probabilistic setting. In the former case, we consider LTL properties satisfied by the Nash equilibria of the game and in the latter case LTL properties satisfied by the core. In both cases, we show that the problem is 2EXPTIME-complete, thus not harder than the much simpler verification problem of model checking LTL properties of systems modelled as Markov decision processes (MDPs).
A framework for the elicitation and debugging of formal specifications for Cyber-Physical Systems is presented. The elicitation of specifications is handled through a graphical interface. Two debugging algorithms are presented. The first checks for erroneous or incomplete temporal logic specifications without considering the system. The second can be utilized for the analysis of reactive requirements with respect to system test traces. The specification debugging framework is applied on a number of formal specifications collected through a user study. The user study establishes that requirement errors are common and that the debugging framework can resolve many insidious specification errors.
In this paper, a cooperative Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem is investigated for multi-input systems, where each input is generated by an agent in a network. The input matrices are different and locally possessed by the corresponding agents respectively, which can be regarded as different ways for agents to control the multi-input system. By embedding a fully distributed information fusion strategy, a novel cooperative LQR-based controller is proposed. Each agent only needs to communicate with its neighbors, rather than sharing information globally in a network. Moreover, only the joint controllability is required, which allows the multi-input system to be uncontrollable for every single agent or even all its neighbors. In particular, only one-time information exchange is necessary at every control step, which significantly reduces the communication consumption. It is proved that the boundedness (convergence) of the controller gains is guaranteed for time-varying (time-invariant) systems. Furthermore, the control performance of the entire system is ensured. Generally, the proposed controller achieves a better trade-off between the control performance and the communication overhead, compared with the existing centralized/decentralized/consensus-based LQR controllers. Finally, the effectiveness of the theoretical results is illustrated by several comparative numerical examples.