Compositionality and modularity in embedded system design: interface synthesis and interface theories

Compositional methods, that allow to assemble smaller components into
larger systems both efficiently and correctly, are not simply a
desirable feature in system design: they are a must for designing
large and complex systems. In this talk I will present some recent
work on this general theme in the context of embedded systems. A key
notion is that of "interface" which allows to abstract a component,
hiding details while exposing relevant information. I will present
methods for automatic bottom-up synthesis of interfaces for
hierarchical synchronous and dataflow models. I will also present
interface theories for such models. Interface theories can be seen as
behavioral type theories. They include the key notion of refinement,
which captures substitutability: when can a component be replaced by
another one without compromising the properties of the entire system.
I will present two such theories:
– synchronous relational interfaces, targeted at synchronous systems
and functional properties;
– actor interfaces, targeted at dataflow models and performance
properties such as throughput or latency.

Stavros Tripakis is an Associate Researcher at UC Berkeley and
visiting Aalto University as an Associate Professor during the Fall of
2012. He obtained a PhD degree in Computer Science at the Verimag
Laboratory in Grenoble, France, in 1998. He was a postdoc at UC
Berkeley from 1999 to 2001, a CNRS Research Scientist at Verimag from
2001 to 2006, and a Research Scientist at Cadence Research Labs in
Berkeley from 2006 to 2008. He works in the areas of embedded,
real-time and distributed systems, focusing on model-based and
component-based design, verification, testing and synthesis. Dr.
Tripakis was co-Chair of the 10th ACM & IEEE Conference on Embedded
Software (EMSOFT 2010) and is the current Vice-Chair of ACM SIGBED.