Prof. Robert de Simone

Robert de Simone is currently a Senior Researcher with the French public research institute Inria in its Sophia-Antipolis center. He is the Scientific Head of the Kairos research team, joint with Université Côte d’Azur. He holds a PhD from the University of Paris and Habilitation Thesis from the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis. He conducted research in Concurrency Theory and Formal Models of Computation and Communication, including Process Algebras and Synchronous Reactive Language, and then focused on practical applications of such Formal Methods to Model-Based System Engineering in the domain of embedded and cyber-physical systems. He authored numerous publications in the field and led Inria partnerships with industrial consortia of various nature.

Research interests

• Concurrency Theory and Models of Computation and Communication
• Semantics and implementation of Synchronous Reactive languages
• Formal Model-Based Design and Application/Architecture Adaptation
• Multiform Logical Time constraints in requirement engineering and specification of Cyber-Physical Systems
• Algorithmic model-checking techniques and schedule synthesis

Keynote

Title of the talk: “Multiform Logical Time to support Formal Model-Based Design of Cyber-Physical Systems”

Time-related issues are paramount in the correct design of (generally safety-critical) real-time systems, with extensive interactions between cyber-controllers and their physical environments. While there is a plethora of useful and perceptive methods / models for analysis of such systems in case of known timing values, in practice these are most often unknown, or yet unset, at design time.

Allowing time variables and parameters for event timing is easily feasible, but we ambition to go beyond that, by defining an algebraic language to express constraints between such parametric events, that we promote to the name of “Logical Clocks”, in a framework of “Multiform Logical Time”.

In the past we have thus introduced a “Clock-Constraint Specification Language (CCSL)”, heavily influenced by theories of Synchronous Reactive Languages and Real-Time Scheduling (in turn both meant to describe CPS design concerns). In the talk, we shall recall some basic notions and results about original CCSL, but also consider new topic extensions in several directions. In all cases, we are faced with a triangular issue: 1. Face the relevance regarding the intended modeling domain; 2. Consider the potential relations with existing theories in that field; 3. Study the mathematical properties of the augmented model.

Most of this contains ongoing research. We shall illustrate, hopefully, our goals with relevant examples drawn from important nowadays CPS modeling areas.