Declarative cyber physical systems modeling to facilitate autonomous vehicles design

Major challenges faced by connected intelligent vehicles, particularly autonomous vehicles, include complexity, dynamics, concurrency, timing, safety, security, and reliability. Among them, the complexity is the key factor for vehicle design. Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are systems consisting of computational components and physical elements. In this paper a declarative CPS modeling framework is proposed such that autonomous vehicles can be articulately modeled to effectively overcome above challenges. A CPS is made up of sensing units in physical environment that input physical signals to control units, actuation units that alter the physical environment, and control units that sends optimized control signals to actuation units. The declarative CPS model can be used to unify the design of both cyber and physical components. This paper also compares the performance of two implementations of CPS sensing and actuation units: one using declarative networking, the other using imperative networking.