A Framework for Evaluating and Validating Energy-saving Cyber-Physical Systems in the Railway Domain through Stochastic Activity Network and Stochastic Hybrid Automata

Day - Time: 03 October 2016, h.11:00
Place: Area della Ricerca CNR di Pisa - Room: C-29
Speakers
Referent

Mieke Massink

Abstract

Cautious usage of energy resources is gaining great attention nowadays, both from an environmental and economical point of view. Therefore, studies devoted to analyse and predict energy consumption in a variety of application sectors are becoming increasingly important, especially in combination with other non-functional properties, such as reliability, safety and availability.

The talk will focus on energy consumption strategies in the railway sector, addressing in particular rail road switches through which trains are guided from one track to another. Given the criticality of their task, the temperature of these devices needs to be kept above certain levels to assure their correct functioning.

By applying a stochastic model-based approach, we analyse a family of energy consumption strategies based on thresholds to trigger the activation/deactivation of energy supply. The goal is to offer an assessment framework through which appropriate tuning of threshold-based energy supply solutions can be achieved, so to select the most appropriate one, resulting in a good compromise between energy consumption and reliability level.

In particular, Stochastic Activity Networks and Stochastic Hybrid Automata models of rail road switch heaters will be evaluated with, respectively, the Moebius and Uppaal SMC tools.