Contract-based integration of cyber-physical analyses

Abstract

Developing cyber-physical systems involves multiple engineering domains, e.g., timing, logical correctness, thermal resilience, and mechanical stress. In today's industrial practice, these domains rely on multiple analyses to obtain and verify critical system properties. Domain differences make the analyses abstract away interactions among themselves, potentially invalidating the results. Specifically, one challenge is to ensure that an analysis is never applied to a model that violates the assumptions of the analysis. Since such violation can originate from the updating of the model by another analysis, analyses must be executed in the correct order. Another challenge is to apply diverse analyses soundly and scalably over models of realistic complexity. To address these challenges, we develop an analysis integration approach that uses contracts to specify dependencies between analyses, determine their correct orders of application, and specify and verify applicability conditions in multiple domains. We implement our approach and demonstrate its effectiveness, scalability, and extensibility through a verification case study for thread and battery cell scheduling.