Award Abstract # 1814739
CSR: Small: Dynamically Customizable Safety-Critical Embedded Systems

NSF Org: CNS
Division Of Computer and Network Systems
Recipient: WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY, THE
Initial Amendment Date: June 25, 2018
Latest Amendment Date: June 25, 2018
Award Number: 1814739
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Jason Hallstrom
CNS
 Division Of Computer and Network Systems
CSE
 Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Start Date: September 1, 2018
End Date: August 31, 2022 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $501,797.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $501,797.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2018 = $501,797.00
History of Investigator:
  • Sanjoy Baruah (Principal Investigator)
    Baruah@wustl.edu
  • Christopher Gill (Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: Washington University
1 BROOKINGS DR
SAINT LOUIS
MO  US  63130-4862
(314)747-4134
Sponsor Congressional District: 01
Primary Place of Performance: Washington University
MO  US  63130-4899
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
01
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): L6NFUM28LQM5
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): CSR-Computer Systems Research
Primary Program Source: 01001819DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 9150, 7923
Program Element Code(s): 735400
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.070

ABSTRACT

Major functionalities of many modern consumer products, such as smartphones are largely defined by the software that runs upon them. Such functionalities are typically customizable, and are often dynamic in the sense that they may be modified via software updates over the lifetime of the device. This project will extend the ability to perform such dynamic customization to safety-critical systems as well, thereby enabling one to customize safety-critical embedded systems and to extend their functionalities as and when a need arises for doing so.

The main challenge in extending dynamic customizability to safety-critical systems arises from the need to ensure the continued correctness, both functional and temporal, of all components of a system upon updating one or more components. This project seeks to meet this need by combining formal methods, which are particularly well-suited to dealing with functional correctness, with real-time scheduling theory, which primarily deals with timing correctness. The major intellectual contribution of this project is thus integrated consideration of formal methods and scheduling theory to develop methodologies for enabling dynamic customizability in a safe and effective manner.

The benefits of dynamic customizability have been made evident by its success in consumer products; the industrial applicability of a framework allowing dynamic customizability of safety-critical systems is potentially enormous, and the findings of this project will enable this. Software implementing algorithmic findings will be made available on the project web-site; all software produced for this project will be open-source. Results obtained will be incorporated into technical publications, survey papers, and perspectives articles. Teaching materials will be developed for relevant courses at the project home institution, and shared with interested instructors elsewhere.

Publications, open-source software, and teaching materials produced by this research will be made available to the public on the web at URL https://sites.wustl.edu/dcsces/ and also will be retained in an Subversion (SVN) repository at Washington University in St. Louis, both for the duration of the project and for at least 5 years following its completion. Digital artifacts needed to reproduce results of this research also will be assigned Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and archived in Washington University's Open Scholarship web portal at https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/ as well as being provided on the https://sites.wustl.edu/dcsces/ project website along with their DOIs.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

Note:  When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

Baruah, Sanjoy "Feasibility analysis for HPC-DAG tasks" Real-Time Systems , v.58 , 2022 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11241-022-09380-z Citation Details
Baruah, Sanjoy and Burns, Alan and Davis, Robert I. and Wu, Yue "Optimally ordering IDK classifiers subject to deadlines" Real-Time Systems , 2022 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11241-022-09383-w Citation Details
Hosseinzadeh, Mehdi and Kolmanovsky, Ilya and Baruah, Sanjoy and Sinopoli, Bruno "Reference Governor-based fault-tolerant constrained control" Automatica , v.136 , 2022 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.automatica.2021.110089 Citation Details
Hosseinzadeh, Mehdi and Sinopoli, Bruno and Kolmanovsky, Ilya and Baruah, Sanjoy "MPC-Based Emergency Vehicle-Centered Multi-Intersection Traffic Control" IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology , 2022 https://doi.org/10.1109/TCST.2022.3168610 Citation Details
Hosseinzadeh, Mehdi and Sinopoli, Bruno and Kolmanovsky, Ilya and Baruah, Sanjoy "ROTEC: Robust to early termination command governor for systems with limited computing capacity" Systems & Control Letters , v.161 , 2022 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sysconle.2022.105142 Citation Details
Sudvarg, Marion and Gill, Chris and Baruah, Sanjoy "Linear-time admission control for elastic scheduling" Real-Time Systems , 2021 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11241-021-09373-4 Citation Details
Abdelzaher, Tarek and Baruah, Sanjoy and Gill, Chris and Vorobeychik, Eugene and Zhang, Ning and Zhang, Xuan "Research Challenges for Combined Autonomy, AI, and Real-Time Assurance" IEEE Third International Conference on Cognitive Machine Intelligence (CogMI) , 2021 https://doi.org/10.1109/CogMI52975.2021.00029 Citation Details
Baruah, Sanjoy "An ILP representation of a DAG scheduling problem" Real-Time Systems , 2021 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11241-021-09370-7 Citation Details

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

Dynamic customization of devices extends both their capabilities and their useful lifespan: the same device may be customized on the fly to perform different functionalities, and new functionalities may be added as they are developed (thereby obviating the need to replace the device with a newer one). This project defined a component-based approach to safety-critical real-time systems design. This required the design of a set of intefaces for components that permit device safety properties (primarily timing-based ones) to be formally expressed according to these interfaces. The approach restricted resource-allocation semantics such that inter-component interactions allow for composibility of timing and other safety properties.  Hence the safety implications of replacing a component with a newer version, or adding an entirely new component, can be understood by simply composing the interaction between the component interfaces according to well-defined composition rules.  Resource-allocation strategies, primarily based on principles of elastic scheduling and management of priorities and other properties of execution, were designed that allow for both computational and temporal elasticity, and were shown to be capable of achieving composable implementation of components upon a variety of platform architectures, both uniprocessor and multiprocessor/ multicore.  

The technical outcomes of this project were disseminated extensively via research publications in major journals, and presentation at and publication in the proceedings of, flagship international conferences.  Issues arising as part of this research were shared at Open Problems sessions at international workshops and seminars.  A postdoctoral scholar and several graduate students worked on aspects of this project, as did some undergraduate students.


Last Modified: 12/17/2022
Modified by: Christopher Gill

Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.

Print this page

Back to Top of page