A reduced complexity design pattern for distributed hierarchical command and control system

Abstract

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) get a lot of attention due to the strong demand for the integration of physical devices and computing systems. There are many design aspects involved in CPS, such as efficiency, real-time, reliability and security. One of the major issues is system integration and verification. In many safety critical systems verification plays an essential role in system design. However, the high complexity for the composition of diverse systems is a major challenge for system verification. In this paper, we focus on command and control systems for search and rescue missions and propose a systematic design pattern called Interruptible RPC to compose complex systems while keeping the verification costs low. This has been made possible due to the reduced state space of the systems designed using our pattern. Therefore, the system models can be efficiently verified using available verification tools. In our experiments, the search and rescue system based on Interruptible RPC pattern had fewer states than the asynchronous one by several orders of magnitude.