2005 MURI Proposal
Title TBD
Richard Murray (PI), Mani Chandy, John Doyle, Eric Klavins, Pablo Parrilo
Proposal Overview
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Background Reading
- E. Klavins, R. Ghrist and D. Lipsky, A Grammatical Approach to Self-Organizing Robotic Systems, Submitted IEEE T. Automatic Control, 2005.
- S. Prajna, A. Papachristodoulou, P. Seiler, P.A. Parrilo, SOSTOOLS and its Control applications, In Positive polynomials in Control, Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences, Vol. 312, pp. 273--292, Springer, 2005.
Topic Description
High Confidence Design For Distributed, Embedded Systems
Background: Prescribed safety and security is a significant challenge for current flight management systems. Requirements, design, and test coverage and their quantification all significantly impact overall system quality, but extensive software test coverage is especially significant to development costs. For certain current systems, verification and validation (V&V) comprise over 50% of total development costs. This percentage will be even higher using current V&V strategies on emerging autonomous systems. Although traditional certification practices have historically produced sufficiently safe and reliable systems, they will not be cost effective for next-generation autonomous systems due to inherent size and complexity increases from added functionality. New methods in high confidence software combined with advances in systems engineering and the use of closed- loop feedback for active management of uncertainty provide new possibilities for fundamental research aimed at addressing these issues. These methods move beyond formal methods in computer science to incorporate dynamics and feedback as part of the system specification.
Objective: Develop new approaches to designing/developing distributed embedded systems to inherently promote high confidence, as opposed to design-then-test approaches as prescribed by the current V&V process. Proposing teams should focus on developing new design methods, analysis techniques, specification and integrated software development/test environments that will radically lower V&V costs for future mixed critical systems. The multidisciplinary team should include the necessary expertise in mathematics, software architectures, security, modeling and simulation, fault tolerant systems, and dynamics and control.
Research Concentration Areas: Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
- formal reasoning about distributed, dynamic, feedback systems, including the application of temporal logic and other tools from computer science and mathematics to reason about real-time software. This applies to both cooperative and adversarial systems in distributed computational environments;
- development of relationships between system properties and test coverage to reduce the required testing and provide improved efficiency, including a mixture of automated testing and model-based reasoning to improve efficiency;
- development and analysis of architectures that provide behavior guarantees of online V&V. Extend current methods for built-in-test (BIT) to higher levels of abstraction, including the use of safety "wrappers" to insure that high performance code is replaced by safe code when online monitors are triggered;
- V&V aware architectures- techniques that are designed to generate software and systems that are easier to verify and validate. Manage V&V complexity instead of managing system functionality;
- multi-threaded control: new tools for reasoning about asynchronous, distributed processing common in multi-threaded computational environments; and
- approximate V&V-development of model-based approaches to V&V that make use of simplifying approximations to improve V&V efficiency. Develop relations of system analysis to the test vector generation to reduce/eliminate required testing.
Impact: Next-generation Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned space vehicles will require advanced mixed critical system attributes to enable safe autonomous operations. These emerging attributes will manifest themselves in all aspects of the system including requirements, system architectures, software algorithms, and hardware components. Development of new theory and algorithms for V&V will provide reduced development time and cost, improved system functionality, and increased robustness to uncertainty for new systems.
Research Topic Chief: Lt Col Sharon Heise, [email protected], 703-696-7796
White Paper
White Paper Format
A WHITE PAPER MAY BE SUBMITTED EITHER ELECTRONICALLY OR IN HARD COPY FORM. FOR ELECTRONIC (as relevant) AND HARD COPY SUBMISSION:
- Paper Size – 8.5 x 11 inch paper
- Margins – 1 inch
- Spacing – single
- Font – Times New Roman, 12 point
- Number of Pages – no more than four (4) single-sided pages (excluding cover letter, cover, and curriculum vitae). White papers exceeding the page limit may not be evaluated.
- Copies – one (1) original and two (2) copies (applies only to hard copy submission)
White Paper Content
- A one page cover letter (optional)
- Cover Page – The cover page shall be labeled “PROPOSAL WHITE PAPER” and shall include the BAA number 05-017, proposed title, and proposer’s technical point of contact, with telephone number, facsimile number, and email address
- Identification of the research and issues
- Proposed technical approaches
- Potential impact on DoD capabilities
- Potential team and management plan
- Summary of estimated costs
- Curriculum vitae of key investigators
White papers should be sent to the attention of the responsible Research Topic Chief at the agency specified for the topic using the address provided in Section IV. 5. The white paper should provide sufficient information on the research being proposed (e.g. hypothesis, theories, concepts, approaches, data measurements and analysis, etc.) to allow for an assessment by a technical expert. It is not necessary for white papers to carry official institutional signatures.
