Improving the Dependability of Self-Adaptive Cyber Physical System with Formal Compositional Contract

Abstract

To adapt to the uncertain environment smartly and timely, cyber physical systems (CPSs) have to interact with the physical world in a decentralized but rigorous, organized way. Guaranteeing the timing reliability is key to achieve consensus on the order of distributed events, as well as dependable cooperative decision processing. Based on our hierarchically decentralized compositional self-adaptive framework, we propose a formal compositional reliability-contract-based solution to guarantee the timing reliability of event observation and decision processing in a large-scale, geographically distributed CPS. As the prophetic decision may not fit the local situation well because of the uncertainties, we propose a gradual contract optimization solution to refine the dependability, timeliness, and energy consumption. Following the seven proposed composition schemes, we employ the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) algorithm to optimize arrangement of decision. Moreover, a topology-aware time reserving solution is applied to improve the resilience of processing time and to tolerance timing failures. Both simulation results and real-world testing are introduced to evaluate the efficacy of our proposal. We believe that the formal compositional contract will be a competitive CPS solution to analyze requirements and optimize the self-adaptation decision at runtime.