Safety-Guarantee Controller Synthesis for Cyber-Physical Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for synthesizing safety-guarantee controllers for cyber-physical systems using a fragment of Linear Temporal Logic, enabling correct-by-design control synthesis without complex automata constructions.

Contribution

It introduces a synthesis approach for cyber-physical systems based on a fragment of LTL, avoiding Safra's construction, and demonstrates preliminary implementation on the PESSOALTL tool.

Findings

Successful synthesis for a fragment of LTL

Implementation demonstrated on two case studies

Avoids complex automata constructions like Safra's automaton

Abstract

The verification and validation of cyber-physical systems is known to be a difficult problem due to the different modeling abstractions used for control components and for software components. A recent trend to address this difficulty is to reduce the need for verification by adopting correct-by-design methodologies. According to the correct-by-design paradigm, one seeks to automatically synthesize a controller that can be refined into code and that enforces temporal specifications on the cyber-physical system. In this paper we consider an instance of this problem where the specifications are given by a fragment of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) and the physical environment is described by a smooth differential equation. The contribution of this paper is to show that synthesis for cyber-physical systems is viable by considering a fragment of LTL that is expressive enough to describe interesting properties but simple enough to avoid Safra's construction. We report on two examples illustrating a preliminary implementation of these techniques on the tool PESSOALTL.