6. A Mechanism for Monitoring Driver-Device Communication

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are complex systems including computing and communication together with control of the physical environment. They must be safe and secure, since they are often used in critical applications involving lives and expensive infrastructure, such as mass transportation, power plants, or medical equipments. The high interaction of these systems with the environment demands that it be comprised of numerous and varied devices. The control of these devices is accomplished by a hardware-dependent software layer highly specialized, which is commonly a source of error that can affect the operation of the entire system. Thus, this approach proposes a technique for specification and runtime monitoring of high-level communication between devices and drivers, which is based on finite-state machines and temporal properties. Supported by a tool set developed in this context, this approach provides a complete workflow, including a domain-specific language, called TDevC, as front-end, followed by the validation and optimization of the high-level models, synthesis from models to real hardware monitors (SystemVerilog) or simulation-based monitoring mechanism for virtual platforms (SystemC). The proposed approach is evaluated with some real-life examples including IP controller of an Ethernet device, a serial port, and a temperature controller using sensors and actuators to validate all the phases of the workflow of the proposed approach. All violation of temporal properties expressed for each device has been detected successfully, including properties involving different layers of the software.