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An actor-based framework for asynchronous event-based cyber-physical systems

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Abstract

In cyber-physical systems like automotive systems, there are components like sensors, actuators, and controllers that communicate asynchronously with each other. The computational model of actors supports modeling distributed asynchronously communicating systems. We propose the Hybrid Rebeca language to support the modeling of cyber-physical systems. Hybrid Rebeca is an extension of the actor-based language Rebeca. In this extension, physical actors are introduced as new computational entities to encapsulate physical behaviors. To support various means of communication among the entities, the network is explicitly modeled as a separate entity from actors. We develop a tool to derive hybrid automata as the basis for the analysis of Hybrid Rebeca models. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach through a case study in the domain of automotive systems. We use the SpaceEx framework for reachability analysis of the case study. Compared to hybrid automata, our results show that for event-based asynchronous models hybrid Rebeca improves analyzability by reducing the number of real variables, and increases modularity and hence, minimizes the number of changes caused by a modification in the model.

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Notes

  1. The exact number depends on the implementation. However since all the parameters of the message server which has the most parameters must be considered, at least this number of variables are needed.

  2. As the properties to be verified do not depend on the value of the speed, to minimize the analysis time, this value has been chosen.

  3. The tool converting a hybrid Rebeca model to a hybrid automaton, as an input of SpaceEX is available at http://rebeca-lang.org/allprojects/HybridRebeca. The tool handles models specified in an intermediate format very close to Hybrid Rebeca. This format is suitable for translation into hybrid automata. The process of translating a Hybrid Rebeca model to the intermediate format is currently manual.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Edward Lee for his support and patient guidance on modeling and analyzing CPSs, Tom Henzinger for his fruitful discussion on the extended actor model, and MohammadReza Mousavi and Ehsan Khamespanah for their useful contributions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

    Iman Jahandideh & Fatemeh Ghassemi

  2. School of Computer Science, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences, P.O. Box 19395-5746, Tehran, Iran

    Fatemeh Ghassemi

  3. School of Innovation, Design and Engineering, Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden

    Marjan Sirjani

  4. School of Computer Science, Reykjavik University, Reykjavik, Iceland

    Marjan Sirjani

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  1. Iman Jahandideh
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  2. Fatemeh Ghassemi
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  3. Marjan Sirjani
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Correspondence to Fatemeh Ghassemi.

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Communicated by Eugene Syriani and Manuel Wimmer.

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Jahandideh, I., Ghassemi, F. & Sirjani, M. An actor-based framework for asynchronous event-based cyber-physical systems. Softw Syst Model 20, 641–665 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-021-00877-y

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