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February 2010
Assistant Professor Sriram Sankaranarayanan
was recently awarded a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award by the
National Science Foundation. The Program is a Foundation-wide activity that
offers the NSF's most prestigious awards in support of the early
career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively
integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their
organization. Such activities build a firm foundation for a lifetime of
integrated contributions to research and education. The project is titled
Automatic Analysis of Cyber Physical Systems: Bridging the Gap between Research and Industrial Practice.
Cyber-physical systems are responsible for numerous control tasks in
safety-critical systems such as automobiles, avionics, medical devices, and
power distribution systems. Guaranteeing the correctness of these systems is of
the utmost importance. However, existing verification and validation techniques
have, thus far, fallen short of addressing this important challenge.
This project will investigate verification techniques for analyzing large and
complex cyber-physical systems. The project will develop rich modeling
formalisms that are capable of capturing realistic system designs at the right
levels of abstraction. These formalisms will form the basis for verification
techniques that can be used to pin-point functional defects in cyber-physical
systems. Specifically, the project focuses on techniques for detecting harmful
numerical precision loss in control systems implemented using fixed and floating
point numbers. Finally, the project addresses the challenge of verifying
complex non-linear systems using interval analysis, convex optimization and
symbolic decision procedures. The results of this research are available to the
community in the form of open-source tools. These tools will directly support
the verification of complex systems.
The approximately $460,000 award is expected to fund the research over a
five-year period.
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