SBIR Phase I: Debugging Smart Cyberphysical Systems

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is based on two trends: (a) software is quickly becoming the most complex and expensive part of engineering products like cars, medical devices, and drones and (b) existing testing and simulation techniques are inadequate for finding software bugs in early design. This leads to expensive recalls and sometimes fatal failures, and increasingly, certification bodies are incorporating stringent testing and verification standards. Successful completion of this project will result in a scalable prototype tool that will help demonstrate to our potential customers, namely the engineering system designer, that it is possible to radically cut down software development cost without compromising on quality. This will be possible using our algorithms and tools that enable effective early discovery of bugs as well as coverage guarantees that give certificates for meeting design requirements. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to develop commercial technology that can scalably analyze the correctness of designs. The software tool built in this project will automatically check the safety of system designs by combining fast numerical simulations, with automatic analysis of design models to cover a large set of possible behaviors from a few traces. Our techniques have had demonstrable success on several industry-scale challenge problems in the automotive, avionics, and medical devices industries. In this project, we will develop a polished prototype of our software tool with features that will enhance the designer's experience. It will provide automated support for debugging complex system designs. These features will flatten the learning curve for the tool and make the approach applicable to existing industry standard design environments like Simulink/Stateflow. We will develop use-cases for the tool that will demonstrate the entire design workflow on challenging problems. The prototype and the use cases will become the basis for the creation of a minimum viable product and for beta testing.