Towards a Reconfigurable Distributed Testbed to Enable Advanced Research and Development of Timing and Synchronization in Cyber-Physical Systems

Published

December 8, 2015

Author(s)

Aviral Shrivastava, J C. Eidson, Marc A. Weiss, Ya-Shian Li-Baboud, Hugo Andrade, Patricia Derler, Kevin Stanton

Abstract

Timing and synchronization play a key role in advanced cyber-physical systems (CPS). Precise timing, as often required in safety-critical CPS, depends on hardware support for enforcement of periodic measure, compute, and actuate cycles. For general CPS, designers use a combination of ASICs or FPGAs and conventional microprocessors. Microprocessors as well as commonly used computer languages and operating systems are essentially devoid of any explicit support for precise timing and synchronization. Modern computer science and microprocessor design has effectively removed time from the abstractions used by designers with the result that time is regarded as a performance metric rather than a correctness specification or criterion.There are interesting proposals and avenues of research to correct this situation, but the barrier is quite high for conducting proof of concept studies or collaborative research and development. This paper proposes a conceptual design and use model for a reconfigurable testbed designed specifically to support exploratory research, proof of concept, and collaborative work to introduce explicit support for time and synchronization in microprocessors, reconfigurable fabrics, language and design system architecture for time-sensitive CPS.

Proceedings Title

2015 International Conference on Reconfigurable Computing and FPGAs

Conference Dates

December 7-9, 2015

Conference Location

Mayan Riviera, MX

Conference Title

International Conference on Reconfigurable Computing and FPGAs

Pub Type

Conferences

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1109/ReConFig.2015.7393352

Local Download

Keywords

Cyber-Physical Systems, Timing and Synchronization, Reconfigurable computing, Distributed Testbed, Correct-by-construction

Citation

Shrivastava, A. , Eidson, J. , Weiss, M. , Li-Baboud, Y. , Andrade, H. , Derler, P. and Stanton, K. (2015), Towards a Reconfigurable Distributed Testbed to Enable Advanced Research and Development of Timing and Synchronization in Cyber-Physical Systems, 2015 International Conference on Reconfigurable Computing and FPGAs, Mayan Riviera, MX, [online], https://doi.org/10.1109/ReConFig.2015.7393352, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=919696 (Accessed April 26, 2024)