Electrical Engineering

Research > Faculty Projects

Specification, Design and Verification of Distributed Embedded Systems

Principal Investigator
Eric Klavins

Sponsor(s)
California Institute of Technology (Caltech)

Award Period
05/01/2006 - 04/30/2011

Abstract
We propose to investigate the specification, design and verification of distributed embedded systems that consist of autonomous components that cooperate with each other and operate in environments with adversarial and random elements. Autonomous components collaborate by exchanging information, and the bandwidth available for communication may be limitied in some situations, for example, ambient noise. Likewise, computational and communication capability of components may vary based on hardware, changing power constraints, failures and repairs. Each autonomous component has a control policy that governs the behavior of the component as part of the overall system. This policy is based on the resources it has and signals it receives from cooperating components, adversarial components, and the noisy environment. Our goal is to develop methods and tools for designing control policies, specifying properties of the distributed embedded system and physical environment, and proving that specifications are met by petitioniing the problem into three parts: specification, design and reasoning, and implementation. Our proposal focuses on the first two parts of the overall problem, with linkage to industry and national laboratories as a mechanism for transitioning the research results to implementation. The potential impact of this work is to establish new formalisms, design tools and insights that are required for effective specification, design and verification of complex, distributed embedded systems. We plan an aggressive strategy for interacting with government and industry, to insure we are focused on problems of most importance to the DoD and to transition the results from a research environment into practice.

For more information, visit http://www.onr.navy.mil/02/BAA/DOCS/BAA_05-017.PDF

Updates or corrections to this page should be sent to gheaton@u.washington.edu.