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Virginia Tech

Formal Techniques for Design and Development of Safety Critical Embedded Systems from Polychronous Models

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Formally-based design and implementation techniques for complex safety-critical embedded systems are required not only to handle the complexity, but also to provide correctness guarantees. Traditional design approaches struggle to cope with complexity, and they generally require extensive testing to guarantee correctness. As the designs get larger and more complex, traditional approaches face many limitations. An alternate design approach is to adopt a "correct-by-construction" paradigm and synthesize the desired hardware and software from the high-level descriptions expressed using one of the many formal modeling languages. Since these languages are equipped with formal semantics, formally-based tools can be employed for various analysis. In this dissertation, we adopt one such formal modeling language - MRICDF (Multi-Rate Instantaneous Channel-connected Data Flow). MRICDF is a graphical, declarative, polychronous modeling language, with a formalism that allows the modeler to easily describe multi-clocked systems without the necessity of global clock. Unnecessary synchronizations among concurrent computation entities can be avoided using a polychronous language such as MRICDF. We have explored a Boolean theory-based techniques for synthesizing multi-threaded/concurrent code and extended the technique to improve the performance of synthesized multi-threaded code. We also explored synthesizing ASIPs (Application Specific Instruction Set Processors) from MRICDF models. Further, we have developed formal techniques to identify constructive causality in polychronous models. We have also developed SMT (Satisfiablity Modulo Theory)-based techniques to identify dimensional inconsistencies and to perform value-range analysis of polychronous models.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Ph. D.
Level thesis:degree_level
doctoral
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Computer Engineering
Department dc:contributor.department
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2015

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Nanjundappa, Mahesh
Chair dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Shukla, Sandeep K.
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Haghighat, Alireza
  • Wang, Chao
  • Clancy, Thomas Charles III
  • Mili, Lamine M.

Subjects

dc:subject × 6

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:5386
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/73483

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Nanjundappa, Mahesh. Formal Techniques for Design and Development of Safety Critical Embedded Systems from Polychronous Models. doctoral thesis, Virginia Tech, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/73483