Design and Analysis of Control Strategies for a Cyber Physical System

Abstract

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) use emerging computing, communication, and control methods to monitor and control geographically dispersed critical system components to allow a high level of confidence about their operation. Simulation methods are frequently used in testing such critical system components, however, it might not be adequate to show the absence of errors given the complexity of the system components under test. Failure in detecting errors in safety critical systems can lead to a catastrophic situation. In this paper we propose an approach, based on simulation and formal analysis, for the reliability analysis of CPS. We illustrate this approach on a well-known industrial case study, the four tank process, demonstrating several challenging features in the design and implementation of CPS. The contributions of this research include presenting control strategies for distributed CPS and the proposal of a novel approach for reliability analysis of CPS. Experimental results obtained show that the proposed approach is efficiently used in order to test and verify the four tanks process system, where simulation results show the validity of approximation and abstraction of the system, and formal analysis is used to validate that several design requirements were satisfied in the control strategies proposed.