Marc Pouzet, Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, ran a Seminar@SystemX on January 26 in SystemX’s premises on the following topic: “Building a Hybrid Systems Modeler from Synchronous Language Principles”.
Abstract
Hybrid systems modeling languages mix discrete and continuous time behaviors, allowing to write together a model of the software and its physical environment. The model is then used as a reference for simulation, testing, formal verification and the generation of
sequential code. This raises important questions related to language design, semantics, and compilation, to produce reliable simulation that run efficiently, and also to generate provably equivalent embedded target code.
In recent work, we introduced a new approach for the design and implementation of a hybrid system modeler that reuses synchronous language principles and an existing compiler infrastructure. The result form the foundation of Zelus, a synchronous language extended with Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs). In this talk, I will summarize the ongoing work on Zelus and the way it has been applied to the SCADE Suite KCG code generator at Esterel-Technologies. In the latter, it was possible to reuse the existing infrastructure entirely with minimal modifications. The proposed language extension is conservative in that regular synchronous functions are compiled as before — the same synchronous code is used both for simulation and for execution on the target platforms.
Biography
Marc Pouzet is Professor in computer science at Ecole normale superieure in Paris and leader of the INRIA team PARKAS. He has been junior member of Institut Universitaire de France (2007-2012). His research topic is the design, semantics and implementation of synchronous languages for real-time embedded software. Together with Paul Caspi and Grégoire Hamon, he developed Lucid Synchrone, an ML extension of Lustre. Several features (programming constructs, compilation techniques) have been integrated in the environment SCADE 6 (Esterel-Technologies) used for safety critical applications. Currently, Marc Pouzet works on the semantics and implementation of hybrid systems modelers (e.g., Simulink, Modelica) and the design and implementation of a synchronous language that mixes discrete and continuous time. He is or has been the advisor for 10 PhD thesis; he received several best paper awards in conferences on embedded software (EMSOFT, LCTES) and, in 2015, with Louis Mandel, the award for the most influential PPDP’05 paper for the language ReactiveML. Marc Pouzet collaborated with several research and production team from industry. He is currently the scientific advisor of Esterel-Technologies on SCADE.
