Guest Editorial

Abstract

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) deal with cyber control and physical processes, as well as the interactions between them. In the domains of automobile and aerospace, many CPS are safety-critical systems, such as cruise control and flight control systems. Undiscovered software or hardware problems in the design may lead to severe safety issues. To address these issues, early-phase rigorous design, modelling, and verification of CPS is promoted. This Special Issue presents the state-of-the-art research results on the topics of safety-critical CPS in the automobile and aerospace domains, particularly for the autonomous vehicles and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Two papers are selected in this Special Section. The first paper presents several very interesting execution time analysis and optimisation techniques to guarantee safety requirements in the model-based development context for a flight control software design. The second paper presents a symbolic verifier, LhaVrf, for the safety verification of concurrent linear hybrid automata. LhaVrf adopts a counterexample fragment based specification relaxation (CEFSR) approach, and integrates with the state-of- the-art symbolic model checker NuSMV and SMT solver Z3. Huafeng Yu, Boeing Research and Technology. Huafeng Yu is a senior researcher with Boeing. Dr. Yu's main research interests include mobile autonomous systems, model-based systems engineering, machine learning, cyber security, certification, as well as software safety and reliability. He is currently a member of IEEE Technical Committee on Cybernetics for Cyber-Physical Systems (CCPS) and chair of its industry outreach subcommittee. He is also a member of SAE standard committee for AADL. Dr. Yu serves as associate editor of IET Journal on Cyber-Physical Systems, as well as guest editor of IEEE Transaction on Sustainable Computing. He is serving or has served on Program Committee of Design Automation Conference (DAC), Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE), International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), WICSA and CompArch, Analytic Virtual Integration of Cyber-Physical Systems (AVICPS). Stanley Bak, Air Force Research Lab. Stanley Bak received a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in 2007 (summa cum laude), and a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2009. He completed his PhD from the Department of Computer Science at UIUC in 2013. He received the Founders Award of Excellence for his undergraduate research at RPI in 2004, the Debra and Ira Cohen Graduate Fellowship from UIUC twice, in 2008 and 2009, and was awarded the Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation (SMART) Scholarship from 2009 to 2013. He is currently a Research Computer Scientist at the Air Vehicles Directorate in the United States Air Force Research Laboratory. Stanley Bak works in the field of formal verification of cyber-physical systems using hybrid automata models. His recent research aims to develop tools and techniques for automatic and scalable formal reasoning of complex system models. Xin Li, Duke University. Xin Li received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA in 2005, and the M.S. and B.S. degrees in Electronics Engineering from Fudan University, Shanghai, China in 2001 and 1998, respectively. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University, Durham, NC, and is leading the Institute of Applied Physical Sciences and Engineering (iAPSE) at Duke Kunshan University, Kunshan, Jiangsu, China. In 2005, he co-founded Xigmix Inc. to commercialize his PhD research, and served as the Chief Technical Officer until the company was acquired by Extreme DA in 2007. From 2009 to 2012, he was the Assistant Director for FCRP Focus Research Center for Circuit & System Solutions (C2S2), a national consortium working on next-generation integrated circuit design challenges. He is now on the Board of Directors for R&D Smart Devices (Hong Kong) and X&L Holding (Hong Kong). His research interests include integrated circuit, signal processing and data analytics. Dr. Xin Li is an Associate Editor of IEEE TBME, IEEE TCAD, ACM TODAES, IEEE D&T, and JOLPE. He served on the Executive Committee of DAC, ACM SIGDA, IEEE TCCPS, and IEEE TCVLSI. He was the General Chair of ISVLSI, iNIS and FAC, and the Technical Program Chair of CAD/Graphics. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2012, two IEEE Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Awards in 2013 and 2016, the DAC Best Paper Award in 2010, two ICCAD Best Paper Awards in 2004 and 2011, and the ISIC Best Paper Award in 2014. He also received six Best Paper Nominations from DAC, ICCAD and CICC. He is a Fellow of IEEE. Corina Pasareanu, NASA/CMU. Corina Pasareanu, ACM Distinguished Scientist, is performing research in software engineering at NASA Ames, in the Robust Software Engineering group. She is employed by Carnegie Mellon University, where she is an Associate Research Professor with CyLab. She also holds a courtesy appointment with CMU Electrical & Computer Engineering. At Ames she is developing and extending Symbolic PathFinder, a symbolic execution tool for Java bytecode. Her research interests include: Model checking and automated testing, Compositional verification, Model-based development, Probabilistic software analysis, Autonomy and Security. She is/was Program/General Chair for several conferences including: Foundations on Software Engineering (FSE 2018), International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV 2015), International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2014), International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2011), NASA Formal Methods Symposium (NFM 2009). She is the recipient of a best paper award (HVC 2014), an ACM Impact Paper Award (2010), the ICSE 2010 Most Influential Paper Award, the IBM HVC Conference Award (2007) and an ACM Distinguished Paper Award (2002). She is currently Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) journal. Ramesh S, General Motors Research and Development. Ramesh S, has been with with General Motors Global R&D in Warren, MI, where he currently holds the position of Technical Fellow and thrust area lead for model based embedded software. At General Motors, he is responsible for providing technical leadership for research and development in several areas related to Electronics, Control & Software processes, methods, and tools. He has been an active industrial member of the Network for the Engineering of Complex Software-Intensive Systems for Automotive Systems (NECSIS), sponsored by the Automotive Partnership Canada. Earlier, Ramesh was on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB), for more than fifteen years. At IITB, he played a major role in setting up a National Centre for Formal Design and Verification of Embedded Software. His areas of research are Rigorous Software Engineering, Embedded Systems and Real-Time Systems. He has published more than 100 papers in International journals and conferences. He has been on the editorial boards of the International Journal on Real-Time Systems and EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems and earlier on IEEE Journal on Embedded System Letters. He is a fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering. Qi Zhu, University of California, Riverside. Prior to joining UCR, he was a Research Scientist at the Strategic CAD Labs in Intel from 2008 to 2011. Dr. Zhu received a Ph.D. in EECS from University of California, Berkeley in 2008, and a B.E. in CS from Tsinghua University in 2003. His research interests include model-based design and software synthesis for cyber-physical systems, CPS security, embedded and real-time systems, energy-efficient buildings and infrastructures, and system-on-chip design. He received best paper awards at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2006, DAC 2007, International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS) 2013, and ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) 2016. He received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2016, and the IEEE TCCPS (Technical Committee on Cyber-Physical Systems) Early-Career Award in 2017. Dr. Zhu has served on the technical program committees and as session organizer and chair for a number of international conferences, including DAC, ICCAD, DATE, ASP-DAC, CODES+ISSS, RTSS, RTAS, SAC, SIES, MEMOCODE, etc. He is the education committee chair of the IEEE TCCPS. He received the ACM SIGDA Service Award in 2015.