On November 9, 2023, Professor Jean-Pierre Talpin, Research Director of the French National Institute of Informatics and Automation (INRIA) and Adjunct Professor of Nankai University, was invited to deliver a talk entitled "CPS design: Engineering safety-critical systems". The seminar was held in Room 101, District 4, TEDA Campus, and was also broadcast live through Feishu. Nearly 100 teachers, undergraduates and graduate students joined this seminar.
The seminar kicked off with the warm applause. Professor Talpin first talked about embedded systems, and used modern high-end cars as an example to show the complexity of such systems. Based on this, he introduced the Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), a next-generation intelligent system that integrates computation with physical processes. Next Professor Talpin focused on the CPS challenges: Design Abstractions, Safety and Timing Predictability. Specifically, the biggest design challenge is in abstractions as most such abstractions do not directly encapsulate characteristics of the environment and it is very hard to predict if the cyber part will meet the requirements of the physical part. Then he analyzed why it was difficult to guarantee the safety in interconnected and interdependent systems and discussed how to ensure safety via formal verification and certification. Regarding the timing predictability challenge, he pointed out that system correctness depends on temporal correctness,.i.e., system produces results at the right time, as the physical system of CPS uses real time. Moreover, the predictable computer architecture, especially the predictability and reliability of the operating system, are mentioned. Finally, Professor Talpin presented models of computation and communication, and demonstrated with cyber-physical modeling of implantable cardiac medical devices to show how to model both the pacemaker and the patient's heart, and further verify their properties through model checker based on timed automata.
After the talk, Professor Talpin answered the questions meticulously and expressed his gratitude to the teachers and students for their warm reception and active participation in the seminar. This talk provides a comprehensive introduction of the CPS system and its design challenges, and the participants benefit a lot from the wonderful talk.
