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Giuseppe Della Penna, Benedetto Intrigila, Daniele Magazzeni, Igor Melatti, and Enrico Tronci. "CGMurphi: Automatic synthesis of numerical controllers for nonlinear hybrid systems." European Journal of Control 19, no. 1 (2013): 14–36. Elsevier North-Holland, Inc.. ISSN: 0947-3580. DOI: 10.1016/j.ejcon.2013.02.001.
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Marco Gribaudo, Andras Horváth, Andrea Bobbio, Enrico Tronci, Ester Ciancamerla, and Michele Minichino. "Fluid Petri Nets and hybrid model checking: a comparative case study." Int. Journal on: Reliability Engineering & System Safety 81, no. 3 (2003): 239–257. Elsevier. DOI: 10.1016/S0951-8320(03)00089-9.
Abstract: The modeling and analysis of hybrid systems is a recent and challenging research area which is actually dominated by two main lines: a functional analysis based on the description of the system in terms of discrete state (hybrid) automata (whose goal is to ascertain conformity and reachability properties), and a stochastic analysis (whose aim is to provide performance and dependability measures). This paper investigates a unifying view between formal methods and stochastic methods by proposing an analysis methodology of hybrid systems based on Fluid Petri Nets (FPNs). FPNs can be analyzed directly using appropriate tools. Our paper shows that the same FPN model can be fed to different functional analyzers for model checking. In order to extensively explore the capability of the technique, we have converted the original FPN into languages for discrete as well as hybrid as well as stochastic model checkers. In this way, a first comparison among the modeling power of well known tools can be carried out. Our approach is illustrated by means of a ââ¬â¢real worldââ¬â¢ hybrid system: the temperature control system of a co-generative plant.
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Giuseppe Della Penna, Alberto Tofani, Marcello Pecorari, Orazio Raparelli, Benedetto Intrigila, Igor Melatti, and Enrico Tronci. "A Case Study on Automated Generation of Integration Tests." In Fdl, 278–284. Ecsi, 2006. ISSN: 978-3-00-019710-9.
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Vadim Alimguzhin, Federico Mari, Igor Melatti, Ivano Salvo, and Enrico Tronci. A Map-Reduce Parallel Approach to Automatic Synthesis of Control Software. Vol. abs/1210.2276. CoRR, Technical Report, 2012.
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 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 65%. 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 in QKS.
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Vadim Alimguzhin, Federico Mari, Igor Melatti, Ivano Salvo, and Enrico Tronci. On Model Based Synthesis of Embedded Control Software. Vol. abs/1207.4474. CoRR, Technical Report, 2012.
Abstract: Many Embedded Systems are indeed Software Based Control Systems (SBCSs), that is control systems whose controller consists of control software running on a microcontroller device. This motivates investigation on Formal Model Based Design approaches for control software. Given the formal model of a plant as a Discrete Time Linear Hybrid System and the implementation specifications (that is, number of bits in the Analog-to-Digital (AD) conversion) correct-by-construction control software can be automatically generated from System Level Formal Specifications of the closed loop system (that is, safety and liveness requirements), by computing a suitable finite abstraction of the plant.
With respect to given implementation specifications, the automatically generated code implements a time optimal control strategy (in terms of set-up time), has a Worst Case Execution Time linear in the number of AD bits $b$, but unfortunately, its size grows exponentially with respect to $b$. In many embedded systems, there are severe restrictions on the computational resources (such as memory or computational power) available to microcontroller devices.
This paper addresses model based synthesis of control software by trading system level non-functional requirements (such us optimal set-up time, ripple) with software non-functional requirements (its footprint). Our experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach: for the inverted pendulum benchmark, by using a quantization schema with 12 bits, the size of the small controller is less than 6% of the size of the time optimal one.
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Vadim Alimguzhin, Federico Mari, Igor Melatti, Ivano Salvo, and Enrico Tronci. Automatic Control Software Synthesis for Quantized Discrete Time Hybrid Systems. Vol. abs/1207.4098. CoRR, Technical Report, 2012.
Abstract: Many Embedded Systems are indeed Software Based Control Systems, that is 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 embedded systems control software. This paper addresses control software synthesis for discrete time nonlinear systems. We present a methodology to overapproximate the dynamics of a discrete time nonlinear hybrid system H by means of a discrete time linear hybrid system L(H), in such a way that controllers for L(H) are guaranteed to be controllers for H. We present experimental results on the inverted pendulum, a challenging and meaningful benchmark in nonlinear Hybrid Systems control.
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Federico Mari, Igor Melatti, Ivano Salvo, and Enrico Tronci. Model Based Synthesis of Control Software from System Level Formal Specifications. Vol. abs/1107.5638. CoRR, Technical Report, 2013.
Abstract: Many Embedded Systems are indeed Software Based Control Systems, that is 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 embedded systems control software.
We present an algorithm, along with a tool QKS implementing it, that from a formal model (as a Discrete Time Linear Hybrid System) of the controlled system (plant), implementation specifications (that is, number of bits in the Analog-to-Digital, AD, conversion) and System Level Formal Specifications (that is, safety and liveness requirements for the closed loop system) returns correct-by-construction control software that has a Worst Case Execution Time (WCET) linear in the number of AD bits and meets the given specifications.
We show feasibility of our approach by presenting experimental results on using it to synthesize control software for a buck DC-DC converter, a widely used mixed-mode analog circuit, and for the inverted pendulum.
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Federico Mari, Igor Melatti, Ivano Salvo, and Enrico Tronci. From Boolean Functional Equations to Control Software. Vol. abs/1106.0468. CoRR, Technical Report, 2011.
Abstract: Many software as well digital hardware automatic synthesis methods define the set of implementations meeting the given system specifications with a boolean relation K. In such a context a fundamental step in the software (hardware) synthesis process is finding effective solutions to the functional equation defined by K. This entails finding a (set of) boolean function(s) F (typically represented using OBDDs, Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams) such that: 1) for all x for which K is satisfiable, K(x, F(x)) = 1 holds; 2) the implementation of F is efficient with respect to given implementation parameters such as code size or execution time. While this problem has been widely studied in digital hardware synthesis, little has been done in a software synthesis context. Unfortunately the approaches developed for hardware synthesis cannot be directly used in a software context. This motivates investigation of effective methods to solve the above problem when F has to be implemented with software. In this paper we present an algorithm that, from an OBDD representation for K, generates a C code implementation for F that has the same size as the OBDD for F and a WCET (Worst Case Execution Time) at most O(nr), being n = |x| the number of arguments of functions in F and r the number of functions in F.
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Federico Mari, Igor Melatti, Ivano Salvo, and Enrico Tronci. Quantized Feedback Control Software Synthesis from System Level Formal Specifications for Buck DC/DC Converters. Vol. abs/1105.5640. CoRR, Technical Report, 2011.
Abstract: Many Embedded Systems are indeed Software Based Control Systems (SBCSs), that is 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 SBCS control software. In previous works we presented an algorithm, along with a tool QKS implementing it, that from a formal model (as a Discrete Time Linear Hybrid System, DTLHS) of the controlled system (plant), implementation specifications (that is, number of bits in the Analog-to-Digital, AD, conversion) and System Level Formal Specifications (that is, safety and liveness requirements for the closed loop system) returns correct-by-construction control software that has a Worst Case Execution Time (WCET) linear in the number of AD bits and meets the given specifications. In this technical report we present full experimental results on using it to synthesize control software for two versions of buck DC-DC converters (single-input and multi-input), a widely used mixed-mode analog circuit.
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Amedeo Cesta, Alberto Finzi, Simone Fratini, Andrea Orlandini, and Enrico Tronci. "Validation and verification issues in a timeline-based planning system." The Knowledge Engineering Review 25, no. 03 (2010): 299–318. Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/S0269888910000160.
Abstract: One of the key points to take into account to foster effective introduction of AI planning and scheduling systems in real world is to develop end user trust in the related technologies. Automated planning and scheduling systems often brings solutions to the users which are neither ââ¬Åobviousââ¬Â nor immediately acceptable for them. This is due to the ability of these tools to take into account quite an amount of temporal and causal constraints and to employ resolution processes often designed to optimize the solution with respect to non trivial evaluation functions. To increase technology trust, the study of tools for verifying and validating plans and schedules produced by AI systems might be instrumental. In general, validation and verification techniques represent a needed complementary technology in developing domain independent architectures for automated problem solving. This paper presents a preliminary report of the issues concerned with the use of two software tools for formal verification of finite state systems to the validation of the solutions produced by MrSPOCK, a recent effort for building a timeline based planning tool in an ESA project.
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