Research Statement
Markus P.J. Fromherz
Embedded, software-based control is a key ingredient for tomorrow's
highly versatile systems, which range from microscopic sensors and
actuators embedded in our environment to networked home and office
appliances to large-scale, distributed systems such as aircraft or
entire factories. These systems will not only be required to be highly
flexible and fault-tolerant, but often adaptive and autonomous as
well. Declarative technologies such as constraint programming and
model-based reasoning are key enablers of the automatic reasoning
required for modular, fault-tolerant, adaptive control of such
systems.
In a model-based approach to control, models represent relevant domain
knowledge about structure, behavior, and constraints on a level easy
to understand and thus readily produced by engineers. At the same
time, formal models - together with embedded, reactive constraint
solvers, distributed software architectures, and sophisticated
reasoning and coordination techniques - provide the means for the kind
of automatic, robust self-configuration, control, and diagnosis that
will be required on future systems.
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