A formal approach for the synthesis and implementation of fault-tolerant industrial embedded systems

Abstract

We demonstrate the feasibility of a complete workflow to synthesize and implement correct-by-construction fault tolerant distributed embedded systems consisting of real-time periodic tasks. Correct-by-construction is provided by the use of discrete controller synthesis (DCS), a formal method thanks to which we are able to guarantee that the synthesized controlled system guarantees the functionality of its tasks even in the presence of processor failures. For this step, our workflow uses the Heptagon domain specific language and the Sigali DCS tool. The correct implementation of the resulting distributed system is a challenge, all the more since the controller itself must be tolerant to the processor failures. We achieve this step thanks to the libDGALS realtime library (1) to generate the glue code that will migrate the tasks upon processor failures, maintaining their internal state through migration, and (2) to make the synthesized controller itself fault-tolerant.