A common vision of the future is one where our everyday environments are replete with smart cyber physical objects networked to form complicated systems of systems. People will interact with these embedded systems both explicitly and implicitly. The systems will be heterogeneous, need to exist for many years, and operate in the context of real world communication, sensing and failure realities. Many of the systems will be unattended (at least for large periods of time) and often performing very important tasks. The systems will be open in the sense that they will permit access to their functions from humans and other cyber physical systems. The current rapid development and deployment of wireless sensor networks and ubiquitous computing systems and their interactions are exacerbating the need for high confidence embedded systems.
Achieving high confidence embedded systems will require new assurance technologies both off-line and on-line. This work addresses on-line run-time assurance. Comprehensive solutions for run time assurances in high confidence embedded systems are developed. The main intellectual contributions are determining how to specify and support at run time a collection of solutions that enable embedded systems to improve confidence and demonstrate application operability. The broad impact of this work is extensive since there is a proliferation of embedded systems being deployed or contemplated for critical applications such as fire fighting, pollution control, disaster response, tracking, military surveillance, and medical assistance.
