A symbolic control approach to the design of cyber-physical systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) consist of computational elements monitoring and controlling physical entities. Their development requires a deep understanding of the dynamics of the physical process usually modeled by differential equations. We present an approach aiming at helping CPS design and based on: 1) a high-level programming language allowing us to specify functionalities of the CPS while abstracting the details of the physical dynamics; 2) an automated model-based synthesis tool generating from a high-level program, a low-level controller implementing the specified functionalities. The approach is based on the use of symbolic models (i.e. discrete abstractions) of the dynamics of the physical process and follows the correct by construction synthesis paradigm. In this talk, we will review our contributions to the field of symbolic control and identify the challenges that need to be addressed in future research.