System-Level Design, Modeling, and Verification of GALS Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are of great significance to industrial automation due to their proficiency in managing complex tasks. Concurrency and heterogeneity, which are fundamental characteristics of CPS, pose significant challenges related to complexities in design, system architecture, timing behavior, semantics, and cyber-physical interdependencies. We propose a system-level approach that leverages the globally asynchronous locally synchronous (GALS) model of computation to offer a structured and correct-by-construction methodology. The research also features a unified colored Petri nets (CPNs)-based modeling framework that bridges cyber and physical domains and enables holistic system verification. The approach comprises three stages: 1) design using SystemGALS for cyber-domain control and data flow, alongside Simulink for physical process modeling; 2) integration of CPN derived from SystemGALS and Simulink for unified representation; 3) formal analysis on the CPN model. In this article, we elaborate on each step of the system-level approach and provide an industrial automation use case for illustration.