Visualisation of Control Software for Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

Cyber-physical systems are typically composed of a physical system (plant) controlled by a software (controller). Such a controller, given a plant state s and a plant action u, returns 1 iff taking action u in state s leads to the physical system goal or at least one step closer to it. Since a controller K is typically stored in compressed form, it is difficult for a human designer to actually understand how “good” K is. Namely, natural questions such as “does K cover a wide enough portion of the system state space?”, “does K cover the most important portion of the system state space?” or “which actions are enabled by K in a given portion of the system space?” are hard to answer by directly looking at K. This paper provides a methodology to automatically generate a picture of K as a 2D diagram, starting from a canonical representation for K and relying on available open source graphing tools (e.g., Gnuplot). Such picture allows a software designer to answer to the questions listed above, thus achieving a better qualitative understanding of the controller at hand.