Model based safety analysis and verification of cyber-physical systems

Critical infrastructures in healthcare, power systems, and web services, incorporate cyber-physical systems (CPSes), where the software controlled computing systems interact with the physical environment through actuation and monitoring. Ensuring software safety in CPSes, to avoid hazards to property and human life as a result of un-controlled interactions, is essential and challenging. The principal hurdle in this regard is the characterization of the context driven interactions between software and the physical environment (cyber-physical interactions), which introduce multi-dimensional dynamics in space and time, complex non-linearities, and non-trivial aggregation of interaction in case of networked operations. Traditionally, CPS software is tested for safety either through experimental trials, which can be expensive, incomprehensive, and hazardous, or through static analysis of code, which ignore the cyber-physical interactions. This thesis considers model based engineering, a paradigm widely used in different disciplines of engineering, for safety verification of CPS software and contributes to three fundamental phases: a) modeling, building abstractions or models that characterize cyberphysical interactions in a mathematical framework, b) analysis, reasoning about safety based on properties of the model, and c) synthesis, implementing models on standard testbeds for performing preliminary experimental trials. In this regard, CPS modeling techniques are proposed that can accurately capture the context driven spatio-temporal aggregate cyber-physical interactions. Different levels of abstractions are considered, which result in high level architectural models, or more detailed formal behavioral models of CPSes. The outcomes include, a well defined architectural specification framework called CPS-DAS and a novel spatio-temporal formal model called Spatio-Temporal Hybrid Automata (STHA) for CPSes. Model analysis techniques are proposed for the CPS models, which can simulate the effects of dynamic context changes on non-linear spatio-temporal cyberphysical interactions, and characterize aggregate effects. The outcomes include tractable algorithms for simulation analysis and for theoretically proving safety properties of CPS software. Lastly a software synthesis technique is proposed that can automatically convert high level architectural models of CPSes in the healthcare domain into implementations in high level programming languages. The outcome is a tool called Health-Dev that can synthesize software implementations of CPS models in healthcare for experimental verification of safety properties.