Guest lecture by Prof. Antônio Augusto Fröhlich, LISHA/UFSC, Brazil

“SmartData: A Data-centric Approach to the Design of Safety-Critical Systems” Data is at the core of the design of modern Safety-Critical Systems. Data is no longer only sensed and processed in the context of the control loops of such systems. It is also secured, stored, and transmitted for the sake of the decision-making processes required for higher levels of autonomy. The task-centered strategies traditionally used to design critical systems consistently support scheduling analysis and verification of tasks execution times, as long as periods, deadlines and execution time estimates are known, but mostly ignore the flow of data across the various components in the system and often assume that data generation time is constant and can be fully encapsulate in the execution time of tasks. A Data-driven approach to the design of such systems can more promptly accommodate requirements such as data freshness, redundant data sources, operational safety, and AI-readiness. It also facilitates the design of mechanisms to monitor, and eventually override, non-deterministic components such as the neural networks commonly used in autonomous systems. In this talk, we present the SmartData concept, which was conceived at LISHA/UFSC to handle these design issues. The talk addresses aspects of domain decomposition, scheduling, communication, formal property specification and verification, and component overriding. The Autonomous Vehicle being built at UFSC lays a case background for the talk. Biosketch Antônio Augusto Fröhlich is a full professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), where he leads the Software and Hardware Integration Laboratory (LISHA) since 2001. He holds a PhD in Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Berlin (2001) and was a visiting researcher at the University of Paderborn (2007), at the University of California, Irvine (2016) and at the University of Luxembourg (2017). He has coordinated several research and innovation projects in connected, secure and intelligent embedded systems, including the ALTATV Digital TV Platform, the CIA² research network on Smart Cities and the Internet of Things, the Smart Campus project at UFSC and Smart Grid projects with partner industries. In 2022, he was a founding member of UFSC’s Research Center for Cyber-physical Systems Security (SecCPS), currently acting as Executive Director.