Industrial Application of the System-Level Simplex Architecture for Real-Time Embedded System Safety
Stanley Bak · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 2009
Cyberphysical systems differ from traditional computer programming applications in that software bugs and mistakes have immediate, possibly dangerous, physical-world consequences. Rather than requiring all control software be formally verified, which is often impractical, we develop a framework based on the Simplex Architecture, where an untrusted complex controller is allowed to actuate the plant while being monitored by a simpler, verified safety controller and associated decision logic. We use hardware/software co-design to eliminate large classes of potential software bugs associated with system control by developing the System-Level Simplex Architecture. Then, within an industrial case study, we use model-checking to help create and verify the safety-critical decision logic component of the System-Level Simplex Architecture, in the end generating verified VHDL (hardware) code.