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New version of Pessoa (1.4)  released and a support mailing list launched. More info in News.

What is Pessoa?

Pessoa is a software toolbox, developed at UCLA's CyPhyLab, for the synthesis of correct-by-design embedded control software. It is based on the recent notion of approximate bisimulation that allows one to replace differential equations, describing a physical system, by an equivalent finite-state machine. Controller design problems can then be solved by using efficient synthesis algorithms operating over the equivalent finite-state machine models. The resulting controllers are also finite-state, are guaranteed to enforce the control specifications on the original physical system, and can be readily transformed into bug-free code for any desired digital platform. The development of Pessoa was partially supported by the NSF awards 0717188, 0820061, and 0953994.

If you are curious about what Pessoa can do or if you are unsettled by the possibility of automatically generating correct-by-design embedded control software, we invite you to:
  1. visit the tutorial and examples sections to see Pessoa in action;
  2. download the book Verification and Control of Hybrid Systems: A Symbolic Approach to learn more about the theory underlying Pessoa.

Pessoa is being released in several phases and not all the functionalities that are theoretically possible are supported by version 1.4 of Pessoa. However, Pessoa 1.4 already lets you:
  1. construct effortlessly finite-state models of linear and switched linear control systems;
  2. use these finite-state models to synthesize controllers for safety and reachability specifications;
  3. simulate the resulting controllers in Simulink.
Future versions of Pessoa will support:
  1. general nonlinear and switched dynamics;
  2. multi-resolution finite-state models;
  3. specifications given by automata on infinite strings;
  4. specifications given in Linear Temporal Logic;
  5. automatic code generation.
We hope you will find Pessoa as useful as we do and we would like to hear any feedback you might have regarding Pessoa. The Pessoa team can be contacted at pessoa(at)ee.ucla.edu.