The development of formal methods for control design is an important challenge with potential applications in a wide range of safety-critical cyber-physical systems. Focusing on switched dynamical systems, we propose a new abstraction, based on time-varying regions of invariance (the control funnels), that models behaviors of systems as timed automata. The main advantage of this method is that ...

This paper describes a combination of techniques from control engineering and formal methods in order to specify and implement control systems for hatch process operations. It extends previous work by providing a non-trivial specification for the top-level polling loop of a control system, and defining composition techniques for controllers. Batch process operations are common in industrial pra...

An attractive and challenging way of constructing complex computing systems is their automated synthesis from a range of behavioural specifications. In this paper, we explore one particular instance of this approach which aims at constructing a GALS (globally asynchronous locally synchronous) system from its behavioural specification given in terms of a suitable transition system. More precisel...

Automatic short answer grading (ASAG) is the automated process of assessing answers based on natural language using computation methods and machine learning algorithms. Development of large-scale smart education systems on one hand and the importance of assessment as a key factor in the learning process and its confronted challenges, on the other hand, have significantly increased the need for ...

Automatic short answer grading (ASAG) is the automated process of assessing answers based on natural language using computation methods and machine learning algorithms. Development of large-scale smart education systems on one hand and the importance of assessment as a key factor in the learning process and its confronted challenges, on the other hand, have significantly increased the need for ...

Molecular programming is concerned with building synthetic nanoscale devices from molecules, which can be programmed to autonomously perform a specific task. Several artifacts have been demonstrated experimentally, including DNA circuits that can compute a logic formula and molecular robots that can transport cargo. In view of their natural interface to biological components, many potential app...

BACKGROUND Synthetic biology aims to engineer biological systems for desired behaviors. The construction of these systems can be complex, often requiring genetic reprogramming, extensive de novo DNA synthesis, and functional screening. RESULTS Herein, we present a programmable, multipurpose microfluidic platform and associated software and apply the platform to major steps of the synthetic bi...

In the domain of Automated Manufacturing Systems (AMS), Supervisory Control Theory (SCT) is a general modelbased framework, which contributes to the automated development of control systems. Although, SCT delivers important theoretical insights to deal with controllers design, its use in the industry is still weak, because of the discrepancy among its abstract controllers and their physical imp...

Dynamic modeling of object-oriented software makes use of scenario diagrams, i.e. descriptions of particular uses of a system in terms of message flow between the objects belonging to the system. Such diagrams help the designer to specify the general behavior of objects as state machines or as collections of methods. Several techniques are discussed for building automated tool support for the d...

A solution-phase automated synthesis of the versatile synthetic intermediate, Garner's aldehyde, was demonstrated. tert-Butoxycarbonyl (Boc) protection, acetal formation, and reduction of the ester to the corresponding aldehyde were performed utilizing our originally developed automated synthesizer, ChemKonzert. The developed procedure was also useful for the synthesis of Garner's aldehyde anal...