A Map-Reduce Parallel Approach to Automatic Synthesis of Control Software

Abstract

Abstract. Many Control Systems are indeed Software Based Control Systems, i.e. control systems whose controller consists of control software running on a microcontroller device. This motivates investigation on Formal Model Based Design approaches for automatic synthesis of control software. Available algorithms and tools (e.g., QKS) may require weeks or even months of computation to synthesize control software for large-size systems. This motivates search for parallel algorithms for control software synthesis. In this paper, we present a Map-Reduce style parallel algorithm for control software synthesis when the controlled system (plant) is modeled as a discrete time linear hybrid system. Furthermore we present an MPI-based implementation PQKS of our algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first parallel approach for control software synthesis. We experimentally show effectiveness of PQKS on two classical control synthesis problems: the inverted pendulum and the multi-input buck DC/DC converter. Experiments show that PQKS efficiency is above 60%. As an example, PQKS requires about 16 hours to complete the synthesis of control software for the pendulum on a cluster with 60 processors, instead of the 25 days needed by the sequential algorithm implemented in QKS.

On minimising the maximum expected verification time

“…, σ 6 }, where each σ i is defined as in Example 3. Examples of simulation strategies are the functions y 1 , y 2 ∈ Y defined as: y 1 ) y 1 (σ i ) = 1 6 , i ∈ [1,6]; y 2 ) y 2 (σ 2 ) = y 2 (σ 4 ) = 1 2 , y 2 (σ i ) = 0, i = 1, 3, 5, 6. Informally, strategy y 1 chooses at random any of the six available simulation campaigns whereas strategy y 2 chooses at random between the simulation campaigns σ 2 and σ 4 .…”

“…Finally, model-based design of CPSs often refers to the activity of synthesising control software from system requirements (see, e.g., [7,6] and citations thereof). Here, instead, we assume that a model for the whole system (software + hardware) is given, and we are only interested in CPS SLFV.…”

Patient-specific models from inter-patient biological models and clinical records

“…In a discrete time setting this problem has been addressed, for piecewise affine systems and safety properties, in [30], [2], [1], [31], [4], [3], [32], [8].…”

Visualisation of Control Software for Cyber-Physical Systems

“…Automatic methods and tools aiming at automatically synthesizing function ctrlLaw have been developed in recent years, for example, in [5][6][7][8][9][10]. In this paper, we will refer to the method described in [10,11], but the approach we describe may be applied to the other ones as well. Namely, the methodology described in [10,11] (which is implemented by the QKS tool) takes as input the following:…”

“…In this paper, we will refer to the method described in [10,11], but the approach we describe may be applied to the other ones as well. Namely, the methodology described in [10,11] (which is implemented by the QKS tool) takes as input the following:…”