A tutorial at KR-2021
KR&R Meets Cyber-Physical Systems: Formalization, Behavior, Trustworthiness
by Marcello Balduccini, Edward Griffor, and Tran Cao Son
by Marcello Balduccini, Edward Griffor, and Tran Cao Son
The aim of the tutorial is to provide an introduction to techniques from Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR&R) that can be used to model and understand Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Specifically, we will describe KR&R-based methods for the formalization of the structure and interdependencies among the components of CPS, of their emerging behavior, and for reasoning about their properties, such as trustworthiness.
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are characterized by a combination of computing components and physical components that interact with each other and with the surrounding physical environment. The complexity of their structure and of their potential interactions has made it challenging for CPS practitioners to devise principled methodologies for their design, deployment, and operations. For similar reasons, it has also been challenging for the technical and regulatory communities to formulate requirements for critical properties of CPS, such as their trustworthiness.
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how techniques from Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR&R) can be helpful in tackling these challenges. We build upon the NIST CPS Framework: a reference framework for CPS recently released by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and produced with public input through a public working. The framework incorporates common definitions of key concepts related to CPS and provides a uniform set of lenses through which stakeholders from multiple disciplines discuss the diverse aspects of CPS despite differences in technical languages, background and priorities. The tutorial illustrates how various common KR\&R techniques can be used to develop a formal representation of a CPS of interest and how they can be used to reason about the behavior of the CPS, as well as about important properties such as trustworthiness.
Introduction (slides)
Overview: the NIST Framework for Cyber-Physical Systems (slides)
KR&R-based formalization of concerns, requirements and their dependencies (slides)
Reasoning about CPS (slides)
Evaluating trustworthiness and other properties of CPS
Partial synthesis and design completion
What-if reasoning tasks
Uncertainty
Practical tools for modeling CPS and reasoning about them (slides)
Open challenges, conclusion, and discussion
Marcello Balduccini is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Decision and System Sciences of Saint Joseph's University. His research spans multiple areas, including reasoning about actions and change; non-monotonic logic and reasoning; planning, scheduling, and optimization; information retrieval; cyber-physical systems, cyber-analytics, threat modeling and mitigation.
Edward Griffor is the Associate Director for Cyber-Physical Systems of the Smart Grid and Cyber-Physical Systems Program Office of National Institute of Standards and Technology. He was, until July 2015 when he joined NIST, one of the three original Walter P. Chrysler Technical Fellows, one of the highest technical positions in industry and one that represents technical excellence throughout global industry, from the automotive to the aerospace, medical and computing industries. He is the Chairman of the Chrysler Technology Council and of The MIT Alliance, a professional association of scientists, engineers, and business experts trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Tran Cao Son has been a professor in Computer Science at New Mexico State University since 2001. One of his main research focuses is the development of actions languages and their applications. He used action languages in the development of various planning systems and application. In recent years, he has been applying automated reasoning and planning to CPS.