Proposal: 0615035 Douglas Niehaus University of Kansas
"CSR-EHS: Semantic Domain Integration for Embedded and Hybrid Systems" Society is increasingly dependent on complex mission-critical engineered systems, e.g., for power grid management. The potential failure of these systems, as was seen in the recent North American and European power grid outages, puts safety, health, and economic concerns of vital national interest in jeopardy. To protect these vital interests, it is crucial that these engineered systems maintain rigorous control over physical properties such as the routing and quality of power flows. To control these physical properties, the system software that manages these engineered systems must monitor, evaluate, and respond to changes in the physical system, while also coordinating computation, communication, sensing and actuation resources across heterogeneous and time-varying application requirements. However, a current lack of integration among the following system domains limits the ability of system developers to exert such precise control: (1) application-specific quality of service (QoS) semantics; (2) the QoS semantics of the system software components used to implement the application; (3) rigorous resource management to ensure application-level QoS requirements can be met; and (4) precise information about the behavior of the system software and the physical system needed for high fidelity control. This research takes a novel approach to integrating these system domains, which so far have been addressed disjointly, by developing mutually consistent formal and verifiable models in each system domain, designing novel policies and mechanisms for exerting precise run-time control across system domains, and supporting efficient and timely collection and dissemination of detailed behavioral information to improve run-time control fidelity. The rigorous integration of these system domains will achieve a much greater correspondence among the system domains' semantics, establishing a foundation for revolutionary improvements in system accuracy and reliability in complex mission-critical engineered systems. In doing so, this research will advance the state of the art in engineered systems and increase system developers' ability to address key current challenges, such as preventing (or at least mitigating) cascading power grid system failures.
