A formal description of a Cyber-Physical system should include a rigorous specification of the computational and physical components involved, as well as their interaction. Such a description, thus, lends itself to a compositional model where every module in the model specifies the behavior of a (computational or physical) component or the interaction between different components. We propose a framework based on Soft Constraint Automata that facilitates the component-wise description of such systems and includes the tools necessary to compose subsystems in a meaningful way, to yield a description of the entire system. Most importantly, Soft Constraint Automata allow the description and composition of components' preferences as well as environmental constraints in a uniform fashion. We illustrate the utility of our framework using a detailed description of a patrolling robot, while highlighting methods of composition as well as possible techniques to employ them.

doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.232.6
Detection and Diagnosis of Deviations in Distributed Systems of Autonomous Agents
1st Workshop on Verification and Validation of Cyber-Physical Systems, V2CPS 2016
Computer Security

Kappé, T., Arbab, F., & Talcott, C. (2016). A compositional framework for preference-aware agents. In Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (pp. 21–36). doi:10.4204/EPTCS.232.6