Special Seminar: Debayan Roy "Multi-Domain Coupling in Cyber-Physical Systems Design"

Multi-Domain Coupling in Cyber-Physical Systems Design

Debayan Roy
Technical University of Munich
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Thursday, 18 March at 13:00
via Zoom: request the link by email [email protected]
Note! the link will be sent to the CS staff separately every day.

Abstract: In a cyber-physical system (CPS), hardware and software components control a physical process. Hence, there is an interplay between the physical dynamics, the control law, the software algorithms, and the hardware resources. Such systems have become very common in several industry sectors such as automotive, avionics, healthcare, manufacturing, and energy. The state of practice in the industry has been to follow a separation of concerns for CPS designs. That is, the control law is calculated and the hardware/software is developed in isolated stages without sufficient knowledge of each other. Thus, the implementation might not preserve the performance guarantees obtained during the control design. Often this leads to a long integration, testing, and debugging phase, besides producing inferior systems. In many cases, it is also challenging to offer safety guarantees.

Considering that many CPSs are safety-critical and cost-sensitive, e.g., modern cars, this talk will advocate the use of integrated modeling, design, and analysis approaches for CPSs. In essence, I will show how the models, metrics, and methods from different design domains (e.g., control, communication, and real-time scheduling) can be coupled together to synthesize safe and cost-efficient CPSs. I will discuss a hybrid optimization technique that enables the co-design of controllers and their distributed software implementations on a realistic automotive hardware platform (i.e., multiple electronic control units connected by a FlexRay bus). I will further illustrate a toolchain, the first of its kind, that integrates the co-design scheme with industry-strength tools for control design and software development respectively. This toolchain enables the design automation for control software.

Considering that next-generation CPSs need to be adaptive, secure, and autonomous, there are several exciting research opportunities for the future. I will give an overview of a few important research problems related to CPSs, i.e.: (i) Co-adaptation of control algorithms and resource allocation towards managing uncertainty; (ii) Analyzing the trade-off between performance, resource usage, and security for CPSs; (iii) CPS implementation involving inference (machine learning) models for sensing and control; (iv) Holistic resource allocation for CPSs implemented using multi-core platforms while ensuring predictability and high-performance. I will further discuss my research vision on the aforementioned topics.

Bio: Dr. Debayan Roy is a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Marco Caccamo’s group at the Technical University of Munich in Germany. He received his Ph.D. with “summa cum laude” in electrical and computer engineering from the Technical University of Munich in 2020 under the supervision of Prof. Samarjit Chakraborty. His research interests are in the area of modeling, design, and analysis of cyber-physical systems. He has predominantly looked into co-design methodologies for cyber-physical systems to bridge the semantic gap between the design of controllers and their hardware/software implementations. He has also worked towards integrating the co-design schemes into industry-strength tools to enable design automation for cyber-physical systems. For his research works, he won the Best Paper Award at RTCSA 2017, while receiving two nominations for the best paper at DATE 2019 and 2020 respectively. He also publishes regularly in top-tier conferences on design automation (i.e., DAC and ICCAD) and real-time systems (i.e., RTSS and RTAS). He has served on program committees for conferences (e.g., RTAS 2021) and reviewed articles for several journals (e.g., ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Springer Journal on Real-Time Systems, and Elsevier Journal of System Architecture).  Webpage: https://www.ei.tum.de/rcs/persons/alumni/roy/