A Platform-Based Design Methodology With Contracts and Related Tools for the Design of Cyber-Physical Systems

We introduce a platform-based design methodology that uses contracts to specify and abstract the components of a cyber-physical system (CPS), and provide formal support to the entire CPS design flow. The design is carried out as a sequence of refinement steps from a high-level specification to an implementation built out of a library of components at the lower level. We review formalisms and tools that can be used to specify, analyze, or synthesize the design at different levels of abstraction. For each level, we highlight how the contract operations can be concretely computed as well as the research challenges that should be faced to fully implement them. We illustrate our approach on the design of embedded controllers for aircraft electric power distribution systems.