Title: Design of Real-time Embedded Control Systems using VDM++ and Bond graphs
Presenters: Peter Gorm Larsen and Marcel Verhoef
Duration: full day
When: Tuesday, 21 June 2011

This tutorial is focused on methods and tools that bridge the gap between the disciplines involved in designing real-time distributed embedded control systems: systems, control, mechanical and software engineering. These disciplines, which have grown up separately, base design on different forms of models - some use discrete event models, and some use continuous time - inhibiting our ability to compare design alternatives rapidly and in particular to model faults and fault tolerance mechanisms that have to cross the boundaries between models. This "design gap" usually leads to sub-optimal designs and long development lead times. This tutorial will demonstrate that combining formal continuous time system models (specified in Bond graphs) with formal discrete event controller models (specified in VDM-RT, a superset of VDM++ designed to deal specifically with static deployment of software on a distributed hardware architecture) through co-simulation allows multidisciplinary modeling during the early system life-cycle, including performance analysis, modeling of faults and fault tolerance mechanisms. The analysis of these effects at every stage in a design process will help to build more dependable real-time embedded systems. This tutorial is initiated from the European Union funded DESTECS FP7 project (Design Support and Tooling for Embedded Control Software, see http://www.destecs.org), which runs from January 2010 until December 2012 and the Overture open-source project for formal modeling using VDM within the Eclipse IDE, see http://www.overturetool.org and https://sourceforge.net/projects/overture. Both projects have recently seen major releases of their associated methodology and tools, which are freely available. These tools form the backbone of the tutorial, which will be aimed at practitioners interested in applying these tools on real-life modeling problems. At the end of the workshop, all participants will have the tools installed on their laptops, and they will have gained some hands-on experience using these tools (the continuous-time tool only on the windows platform though).

Peter Gorm Larsen is currently a professor at Aarhus School of Engineering where he act as the team lead for the software engineering team. After receiving his M.Sc. degree at the Technical University of Denmark in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science in 1988, he went to industry to bridge the gap between academia and industry. He later returned and did an industrial Ph.D. degree which was completed in 1995. He gave industrial courses all over the world, and had an industrial career until he decided to return to academia in 2005. His prime research interest is to improve the development of complex missing critical applications with well-founded technologies. He is the author of more than 70 papers published in journals, books and conference proceedings and a couple of books.

Marcel Verhoef is consultant Embedded Systems Architecting at Chess, Haarlem, The Netherlands. At Chess, he is actively involved in new product development as well as managing several research collaborations with academia. He has more than fifteen years experience of applying the Vienna Development Method (VDM) in industry. He is co-author of the book "Validated Designs for Object-Oriented Systems" and participant in the Overture open source project on formal modeling in VDM. He completed his PhD at the Radboud University Nijmegen on combining continuous time and VDM models for describing distributed embedded real-time control systems. This work was the precursor of the DESTECS FP7 project and associated tools, which will be showcased in this tutorial. His interest include model based design and wireless sensor networks. He is treasurer of Formal Methods Europe. See http://www.marcelverhoef.nl for more details on his work.