Integrated Modelling, Fault Management, Verification and Reliable Design Environment for Cyber-Physical Systems

Project Information

IMMORTAL

Grant agreement ID: 644905

DOI

10.3030/644905

Project closed

EC signature date 1 December 2014

Start date 1 March 2015

End date 28 February 2018

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 3 996 652,50

EU contribution

€ 3 996 652,50

Coordinated by

TALLINNA TEHNIKAÜLIKOOL
Estonia

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - IMMORTAL (Integrated Modelling, Fault Management, Verification and Reliable Design Environment for Cyber-Physical Systems)

Reporting period: 2017-03-01 to 2018-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In IMMORTAL, a consortium of leading European academic and industrial players combined their expertise in developing an integrated, cross-layer modelling based tool framework for fault management, verification and reliable design of dependable cyber-physical systems.
Recently, the world has seen emerging Cyber-Physical System (CPS) modelling frameworks addressing various design aspects such as control, security, verification and validation. However, there have been no considerations for reliability and automated debug (i.e. design error localisation and correction) aspects. The main aim of IMMORTAL was to fill this gap by introducing reliable design and automated system debug into CPS modelling. To reach this aim, the project developed a cross-layer CPS model spanning analogue mixed-signal circuits, hardware architecture, firmware, operating system and application layers. In addition, a holistic fault model for representing fundamentally different error sources in CPSs (design bugs, wear-out and environmental effects) in a uniform manner was proposed. Moreover, IMMORTAL developed a fault management infrastructure on top of the reliable design framework that allows ultra-fast fault detection, isolation and recovery in the emerging many-core based CPS architectures that are expected to be increasingly adopted in the coming years.
As a result, the project served as an enabler for development of dependable CPSs with improved reliability and extended effective life-time, which is a particular concern in emerging nanoelectronics technologies that are becoming increasingly vulnerable to disturbances, ageing and process variations. The tool framework to developed within IMMORTAL was evaluated on a clearly specified real-world use-case of a satellite on-board-computer. However, the results are more general and applicable to many application domains, including avionics, automotive and telecommunication.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

IMMORTAL addressed the problem of analysing and verifying reliability aspects of the hardware components of CPS. The project developed complete and automated methods for reliability analysis. In addition, high-level reliability models were developed that will combine the per-component analyses into a system-wide reliability characterisation.
In fault management, early fault detection and fast recovery by implementing a cross-layer fault management approach was achieved. This enables a graceful degradation environment for the CPS, where the systems’ tolerance to faults and life-time is improved and costs for maintenance are significantly reduced.
Concerning automated debug, IMMORTAL developed verification engines for CPS and extended them by automated design error localisation and correction capabilities. Previously, solutions for automated debug in CPSs were missing. Yet, it has been shown by numerous studies that error localisation and correction in digital computing systems consume a major portion of the overall development effort. In CPSs, this problem is going to be even more severe due to the underlying complexity and heterogeneity.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

IMMORTAL went beyond state of the art in CPS development in three areas: reliable design, fault management and automated debug. Its innovations led to the following improvements.
1) Minimisation of the verification effort in CPSs by a factor of 2 by enabling automated debug (error localisation and correction) in such systems. Methods that rely on lightweight models for CPS will be developed therefore, improving the scalability.
2) Speeding up fault detection, isolation and recovery in CPSs by a factor of 6 by implementing a cross-layer approach, a holistic fault model and a new fault management architecture.
3) Graceful degradation: by resumption of correct operation with up to 80% of CPS network resources failed. To be achieved by development of network reconfiguration, fault localisation and resource isolation schemes for CPSs based on many-core networks.
4) Up to 50% reduction in the effort designers put in reliability related tasks by developing an automated and complete sign-off tool.
5) Up to 10% savings in the total area as well as power consumption achieved by optimising hardware protection logic overhead.

These improvements result in the following overall expected impacts to future CPSs:
• 30-40% reduction of development time
• 40% reduction in maintenance costs
This will translate to cheaper, yet dependable CPSs for the society.

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