Synthesis of event-based controllers: a software engineering challenge

Abstract

Existing software engineering techniques for automatic synthesis of event-based controllers have various limitations. In the context of the world/machine approach such limitations can be seen as restrictions in the expressiveness of the controller goals and domain model specifications or in the relation between the controllable and monitorable actions. In this thesis we aim to provide techniques that overcome such limitations, e.g. supporting more expressive goal specifications, distinguishing controllable from monitorable actions or guaranteeing achievement of the desired goals, among others. Hence, improving the state of the art in the synthesis of event-based controllers. Moreover, we plan to provide efficient tools supporting the developed techniques and evaluate them by modelling known case studies from the software engineering literature. Ultimately, showing that by allowing more expressiveness of controller goals and domain model specifications, and explicitly distinguishing controllable and monitorable actions such case studies can be more accurately modelled and solutions guaranteeing satisfaction of the goals can be achieved.