Goerschwin Fey

Leandro Lanzieri, Peter Kietzmann, Goerschwin Fey et al.

Ageing detection and failure prediction are essential in many Internet of Things (IoT) deployments, which operate huge quantities of embedded devices unattended in the field for years. In this paper, we present a large-scale empirical analysis of natural SRAM wear-out using 154 boards from a general-purpose testbed. Starting from SRAM initialization bias, which each node can easily collect at startup, we apply various metrics for feature extraction and experiment with common machine learning methods to predict the age of operation for this node. Our findings indicate that even though ageing impacts are subtle, our indicators can well estimate usage times with an $R^2$ score of 0.77 and a mean error of 24% using regressors, and with an F1 score above 0.6 for classifiers applying a six-months resolution.

Leandro Lanzieri, Jiri Kral, Goerschwin Fey et al.

Microcontrollers are increasingly present in embedded deployments and dependable systems, for which malfunctions due to hardware ageing can have severe impact. The lack of deployable techniques for ageing monitoring on these devices has spread the application of guard bands to prevent timing errors due to degradation. Applying this static technique can limit performance and lead to sudden failures as devices age. In this paper, we follow a software-based self-testing approach to design monitoring of hardware degradation for microcontrollers. Deployable in the field, our technique leverages timing windows of variable lengths to determine the maximum operational frequency of the devices. We empirically validate the method on real hardware and find that it consistently detects temperature-induced degradations in maximum operating frequency of up to 13.79 % across devices for 60 °C temperature increase.

Maximilian Schmidt, Swantje Plambeck, Markus Knitt et al.

Effective models of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are crucial for their design and operation. Constructing such models is difficult and time-consuming due to the inherent complexity of CPS. As a result, data-driven model generation using machine learning methods is gaining popularity. In this paper, we present Flowcean, a novel framework designed to automate the generation of models through data-driven learning that focuses on modularity and usability. By offering various learning strategies, data processing methods, and evaluation metrics, our framework provides a comprehensive solution, tailored to CPS scenarios. Flowcean facilitates the integration of diverse learning libraries and tools within a modular and flexible architecture, ensuring adaptability to a wide range of modeling tasks. This streamlines the process of model generation and evaluation, making it more efficient and accessible.

Swantje Plambeck, Ali Salamati, Eyke Huellermeier et al.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are complex systems that require powerful models for tasks like verification, diagnosis, or debugging. Often, suitable models are not available and manual extraction is difficult. Data-driven approaches then provide a solution to, e.g., diagnosis tasks and verification problems based on data collected from the system. In this paper, we consider CPS with a discrete abstraction in the form of a Mealy machine. We propose a data-driven approach to determine the safety probability of the system on a finite horizon of n time steps. The approach is based on the Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) learning paradigm. Thus, we elaborate a connection between discrete logic and probabilistic reachability analysis of systems, especially providing an additional confidence on the determined probability. The learning process follows an active learning paradigm, where new learning data is sampled in a guided way after an initial learning set is collected. We validate the approach with a case study on an automated lane-keeping system.

Roderick Bloem, Goerschwin Fey, Fabian Greif et al.

Constructing good test cases is difficult and time-consuming, especially if the system under test is still under development and its exact behavior is not yet fixed. We propose a new approach to compute test strategies for reactive systems from a given temporal logic specification using formal methods. The computed strategies are guaranteed to reveal certain simple faults in every realization of the specification and for every behavior of the uncontrollable part of the system's environment. The proposed approach supports different assumptions on occurrences of faults (ranging from a single transient fault to a persistent fault) and by default aims at unveiling the weakest one. Based on well-established hypotheses from fault-based testing, we argue that such tests are also sensitive for more complex bugs. Since the specification may not define the system behavior completely, we use reactive synthesis algorithms with partial information. The computed strategies are adaptive test strategies that react to behavior at runtime. We work out the underlying theory of adaptive test strategy synthesis and present experiments for a safety-critical component of a real-world satellite system. We demonstrate that our approach can be applied to industrial specifications and that the synthesized test strategies are capable of detecting bugs that are hard to detect with random testing.