A Rewriting Framework for Interacting Cyber-Physical Agents

arXiv (Cornell University)

Abstract

The analysis of cyber-physical systems (CPS) is challenging due to the large state space and the continuous changes occurring in their constituent parts. Design practices favor modularity to help reducing this complexity. In a previous work, we proposed a discrete semantic model for CPS that captures both cyber and physical aspects as streams of discrete observations, which ultimately form the behavior of a component. This semantic model is denotational and compositional, where each composition operator algebraically models an interaction between a pair of components. In this paper, we propose a specification of components as rewrite systems. The specification is operational and executable, and we study conditions for its semantics as components to be compositional. We demonstrate our framework by modeling a coordination of robots moving on a shared field. We show that our system of robots can be coordinated by a protocol in order to exhibit a desired emerging behavior. We use an implementation of our framework in Maude to give practical results.

Authors 3

1. Benjamin Lion
2. Farhad Arbab Aachen

   Leiden University · Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica

   Affiliation as printed

   CWI , Amsterdam , The Netherlands

   Leiden University , Leiden , The Netherlands

3. Carolyn Talcott

   SRI International

   Affiliation as printed

   SRI International , CA , USA