Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Autonomous cars and Internet-of-Things (IoT) can improve our lives in many ways. Self-driving cars are expected to eliminate 90% of accidents. IoT is about connecting sensors, actuators and many previously unconnected things through the Internet. It is the key enabler of many important applications such as emergency and disaster management systems, smart cities and connected vehicles. Despite recent advances in autonomous and connected systems, society does not yet fully trust these systems due to their critical failures such as examples of  self-driving cars' accidents or connectivity and performance issues in disaster relief systems. Autonomous and connected systems have complex cyber physical traits. Similar to other cyber physical systems (CPS), to ensure their correctness, reliability and robustness, these systems are subject to extensive verification and testing throughout their entire development lifecycle. In the past years, automated techniques for verification, testing and bug fixing of software programs have progressed significantly. However, for today's connected and autonomous CPS, there is a need to system-level testing and bug fixing techniques that can be applied at scale and can handle heterogeneity, cyber physical and connectivity aspects of these systems. This research program develops automated system testing and repair methods for CPS, effectively leveraging system specifications and the knowledge encoded into system components and their interfaces. The research will build on realistic inputs and artifacts that are commonly created during CPS development and addresses a prevalent situation in the CPS domain, whereby the system behavioural design is specified in executable and domain-specific modeling languages such as Simulink and tested early on via dedicated, high-fidelity simulators. The goals of this research will be achieved through novel, scalable and practical techniques that reveal, debug and repair requirements violations in CPS models. These techniques, while enabling early and system testing and repair of CPS, will address two major challenges in CPS verification: (1) handling complexity and heterogeneity of CPS, and (2) revealing and repairing violations pertaining to undesired interactions among system components. The outcome of this research will be tool-supported and automated system-level testing and repair approaches for CPS, leading to software verification techniques that can have a major role in reducing development costs, increasing trustworthiness, and improving innovation. I anticipate that the expertise and tools developed in this research will pave the way to long-lasting, high-impact collaborations with the automotive and telecommunication sectors in Canada. The research program will further help train many students and researchers with the knowledge and skills necessary to push the boundaries of research and innovation in emerging fields such as IoT-enabled and autonomous systems.