Uncertainty in Monotone Codesign Problems

This work contributes to a compositional theory of “codesign” that allows to optimally design a robotic platform. In this framework, the user describes each subsystem as a monotone relation between “functionality” provided and “resources” required. These models can be easily composed to express the codesign constraints among different subsystems. The user then queries the model to obtain the design with minimal resources usage, subject to a lower bound on the provided functionality. This letter concerns the introduction of uncertainty in the framework. Uncertainty has two roles: First, it allows to deal with limited knowledge of the models; second, it also can be used to generate consistent relaxations of a problem, as the computation requirements can be lowered, should the user accept some uncertainty in the answer.