A graphical environment to express the semantics of control systems

Abstract

We present the concept of a unified graphical environment for expressing the semantics of control systems. The graphical control system design environment in Simulink already allows engineers to insert a variety of assertions aimed the verification and validation of the control software. We propose extensions to a Simulink-like environment's annotation capabilities to include formal control system stability, performance properties and their proofs. We provide a conceptual description of a tool, that takes in a Simulink-like diagram of the control system as the input, and generates a graphically annotated control system diagram as the output. The annotations can either be inserted by the user or generated automatically by a third party control analysis software such as IQC$β$ or $μ$-tool. We finally describe how the graphical representation of the system and its properties can be translated to annotated programs in a programming language used in verification and validation such as Lustre or C.