Integrated modeling and analysis of computer-based embedded control systems

Embedded real-time systems are ubiquitous in modern society, many of which perform safety-critical functions, and therefore, it is imperative to have tools and techniques that can guarantee a high degree of system correctness. They typically perform information processing on a digital computer tightly coupled with the continuous physical environment. Even though hybrid systems is an active research area, most work has ignored the scheduling behavior of software processes due to contention for the shared CPU resource. We propose an integrated approach based on hybrid automata and model-checking for modeling and analysis of computer-based embedded control systems where real-time scheduling behavior of the controller software is explicitly represented at the model-level, together with the physical environment that it interacts with. An application example is used to demonstrate the benefits of the integrated approach in performing tradeoff analysis involving both the controller software and the controlled physical system.