Tighter Dimensioning of Heterogeneous Multi-Resource Autonomous CPS with Control Performance Guarantees

In modern autonomous systems, there is typically a large number of connected components realizing complex functionalities. For example, in autonomous vehicles (AVs), there are tens of millions of lines of code implemented on hundreds of sensors, controllers, and actuators. AVs have been deployed, mostly in trials and restricted environments, showing that substantial progress has been made in functionality development. However, they are still faced with two major challenges: (i) performance guarantee of safety-critical functions under all possible scenarios; (ii) functionality implementation with limited resources. These two challenges are conflicting because safety guarantees necessitate a worst-case analysis that is often very pessimistic for complex hardware/software systems, and thus require more resources. To address this, we study an abstraction of a heterogeneous cyber-physical system architecture consisting of a mix of high- and low-quality resources, such as time- and event-triggered resources, or wired and wireless resources. We show that by properly managing such a mix of resources and formulating a formal verification (model checking) problem, it is possible to tightly dimension the high-quality resource to the minimum (50% in certain cases) while providing control performance guarantees.