Certification of real time guarrantees for reactive applications

The complexity to design IoT networks increases with the number of devices, sometimes even exponentially when each node is connected through the network to all other nodes.

As a consequence, a local change in one of the nodes can have global implications on the emerging properties of the network.

For instance, in the case of an automatic industrial process, machines operate in series on a product and the time and physical effect of each operation needs to be properly calibrated to get the expected result.

There comes two main challenges: give a design framework with sufficient expressiveness to specify real time effects of programs (interaction with physical object); and provide formal tools to analyze the individual properties of each node, and the resulting property of the network.Ideally, the design of an application should be close enough to the programmer’s way of thinking, so that few errors are made at specification.

Then, a compiler automatically transforms a program to a binary that a machine can executes.

The correctness of a compiler lays in the semantic preservation theorem: the generated binary has the same behavior as the specification that the programmer wrote.The focus, however, has mostly been done on the preservation of memory properties, but not on time properties.

My idea is therefore to extend the theoretical and practical tools used in compiler correctness to provide timing guarantees in the semantic preservation theorem.

This challenge is ambitious as it would provide a new spectrum of certifications for hard real time applications; and is seen as the next big step for current compiler design.

I will use some advance techniques from reactive programming and current knowledge in compiler correctness to provide real time certificates.