The field of this research is the design, synthesis and verification of asynchronous and reactive event handling and processing hardware. This hardware is expected to work in an environment of concurrent, distributed, and real-time computation networks. These networks include both truly distributed systems such as wireless networking, sensor networks, and real-time networks as well as highly integrated on-chip networked computers with distributed processing. These systems are becoming more complex, and the traffic among the processing elements is increasing. Therefore handling the events which make up the traffic may determine much of the system performance and characteristics. Both asynchrony and non-determinism are inevitable for computation networks in the future, firstly because of the different timing requirements of different and diverse functional elements. Secondly, concurrent and distributed system implementations lead to greater asynchrony and non-determinism as semiconductor technology advances and the degree of integration increases (the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS-05) Design document emphasizes multiple clock domains and source-synchronous signalling, and predicts networks of self-timed blocks). Existing methods of designing event-handling systems in hardware are rather ad hoc and have no systematic modelling and synthesis support.From this point of view, the project proposed here may have a major impact on the industrial as well as academic community. We aim to develop a design and synthesis method for self-timed hardware subsystems (called self-timed event processors or STEPs). STEPs will handle events arriving asynchronously and non-deterministically from multiple sources, and respond (such as by allocating resources, whose availability may also be asynchronously and non-deterministically changing) according to user specifications. Self-timing is in the sense that the triggering information is derived from the signals representing the events themselves, and STEPs may be used to form virtual self-timed reactive service blocks with off the shelf service IP cores such as processors or communications devices. We propose that this method will include a general STEP architecture, techniques for deriving wire delay aware designs for the integral parts of the architecture, and techniques for verifying such designs. A general mathematical modelling technique for STEPs at all levels of detail based on Petri nets will form the basis for the design/synthesis and verification work. We aim to develop the design and synthesis techniques to a degree where the process becomes systematic, highly algorithmic, and potentially automatic, and will cover all levels of detail down to hardware gate level schematics. It is our view that STEP technology will be a step forward in the event handling front, and will help towards the realization of systems of self-timed blocks envisioned in ITRS-05.The project will involve as a collaborator MBDA UK Ltd, a leading European privider of design technology for real-time distributed systems for missile control. The company has pioneered the Butler (awarded with The Queed's Award for Enterpise 2004) and Route-Table technologies, which provide stimulating starting ideas for STEP, such as tiled circuit architecture.

Blast loading from explosives remains a global threat to life. This can be targeted terrorist attacks such as the 7/7 bombings and Manchester Arena attacks, the lasting effects of explosive remnants of war (such as landmines in post-conflict regions), or explosive violence in active conflict zones (such as Ukraine). The research community has a good understanding of blast loads generated in simplified settings, such as high explosives detonated in free air, but real-world explosions occur when explosives are encased in other media (such as suitcases, pipe bombs, landmines, and IEDs). The HEADaMM project will develop world-leading experimental approaches to identify the complex mechanisms involved in detonating explosives surrounded by media other than air, including measuring the loads and tracking how the explosive fireball expands and interacts with its surroundings. By understanding the effects of the surrounding medium, we will unlock the key to controlling the subsequent blast shock and ejecta, making it possible to predict and mitigate their deadly effects. This project will, for the first time, use thermal management of the explosive energy output to understand and control the subsequent blast shock from a high explosive detonation. A mechanistic model for how the load from an encased charge is transferred into the surroundings will be generated by conducting physical tests with a novel, world-leading apparatus for the measurement of loading from explosions. This is to be combined with expertise in the fields of optics/thermometry to enable us to fully quantify the state of the explosion at any point in time. The knowledge and supporting model will be able to drive forward applications such as civilian demining suits and protection for humanitarian convoys, as well as protection for buried services in urban environments. Specifically, the model will allow for the optimization of the protection afforded by life-preserving systems based on the conditions/threat to be encountered, which has never previously been attempted.

Plasma is a state of matter that exists when the energy level or temperature become so high that electrons are no longer bound to atoms. This produces at least two species (negative electrons and positive ions) with opposite charge and very different masses (electron mass << ion mass). The charge of both types of particle make them each respond to electromagnetic fields (such as light, microwave and radio waves), but in opposite directions, and at very different rates. They particularly respond to waves at frequencies close those of natural plasma oscillations, determined by complicated combinations of the magnitude and direction of any static magnetic field, the number density and mass of the particles. They can absorb wave energy at frequencies called 'resonances', and reflect wave energy at frequencies called 'cut-offs'. These effects are often used to heat or measure plasmas in important laboratory experiments and applications, such as new techniques for energy production through fusion reactions (magnetically confined) and industrial processing as well as natural plasmas in the Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere. Both natural ionospheric and magnetospheric plasmas are important to modern communication and navigation systems. In industrial processing, plasma physics underpins semiconductor processing and hence modern digital technology. In fusion energy research the impact potential is to enable an almost unlimited supply of energy, addressing serious environmental concerns surrounding the use of fossil fuel, with no long term radioactive byproducts. Parametric coupling refers to a multi-wave interaction where two or more waves exchange energy when their frequencies are related by a natural plasma oscillation frequency. Such processes have recently been found to cause difficulties in laser-plasma interactions for inertial confinement fusion, whilst at the same time offering exciting potential for new and more flexible ways of delivering energy into both inertially and magnetically confined fusion plasmas. Indications exist that suggest such new techniques will be increasingly important as such research moves from fundamental experiments to application scale equipment. We therefore propose to undertake fundamental research investigating these interactions in the microwave frequency range. The microwave range is particularly appealing for such research since powerful sources and amplifiers, developed for a range of applications, are readily available, can be very precisely controlled, enhancing the ability to investigate the plasma physics dynamics, whilst groundbreaking research points towards microwave generators achieving very high levels of normalised intensity (a measure of the effective intensity of the wave, affected by the wavelength, meaning that microwave intensities are effectively 'uplifted' compared to optical intensities). This therefore indicates potential in the microwave frequency range to explore the dynamics of extreme ranges of wave-plasma interaction in the near future. The project will be based at the University of Strathclyde where it benefits from co-location within a pre-eminent microwave source research laboratory. A further motivation for investigating the effect of wave coupling using microwaves is its direct application relevance to industrial processing and magnetic confinement fusion plasma physics. The coupling of two precisely controlled microwave beams (~10cm to 3cm wavelength) in a (weakly to strongly) magnetised helicon plasma by plasma (acoustic-like) oscillations in the electrons and ions, cyclotron oscillation of the electrons and ions and hybrid oscillations including both quasi-acoustic and cyclotron motion will be investigated, as will the effects of stochastic heating where 'quasi-random' motion of particles in high amplitude waves gives very rapid increase in effective temperature.

Robots are increasingly becoming an important part of our day-to-day lives, automating tasks such as keeping our homes clean, and picking/packing our parcels at large warehouses. An aging population and the need to substitute human workers in dangerous and repetitive tasks have now resulted in new tasks on the horizon (e.g., in agriculture automation and environmental monitoring), requiring our robots to do more, to work in large-numbers as part of a swarm (a large team of robots), to coordinately sense and act over vast areas, and efficiently perform their mission. However, our robot swarms to date are unprepared for deployment; unable to deal with the inevitable damages and faults sustained during operation, they remain frail systems that cease functioning in difficult conditions. The goal of this project is to remedy this situation by developing algorithms for robot swarms to rapidly -- in no more than a few minutes -- recover from faults and damages sustained by robots of the swarm. The existing fault-tolerant systems for robot swarms are limited. They are constrained to only diagnose faults anticipated a priori by the designer, which can hardly encompass all the possible scenarios a robot swarm may encounter while operating in complex environments for extended periods of time. The multitude of robots in a swarm and the large number of intricate ways they can interact with each other makes it difficult to predict potential faults and predefine corresponding recovery strategies; which may explain why none of the existing fault-detection and fault-diagnosis systems have been extended to provide fault-recovery mechanisms for robot swarms. Therefore, in order to design fault-tolerant algorithms for robot swarms, we need to move beyond the traditional approaches relying on fault-diagnosis information for fault recovery. Fault recovery in a robot swarm may instead be formulated as an online behavior-adaptation process. With such an approach, the robots of the swarm adapt their behavior to sustained faults by learning via trial-and-error new compensatory behaviors that work despite the faults. However, the current approaches to learning new robot swarm behaviors are time-consuming, requiring several hours. Therefore, such approaches are inappropriate for behavior adaptation (learning new swarm behaviors) for rapid fault recovery. Behavior adaptation for effective fault recovery requires the robot swarm to creatively and rapidly learn new compensatory swarm behaviors online, that work despite the sustained faults, effectively recovering the swarm from the faults. The proposal will address these requirements by investigating data-efficient machine learning techniques for rapid online behavior adaptation, guided by creatively and automatically generated intuitions -- evolved offline -- of working swarm behaviors. The resulting system would have a significant impact on long-term operations of robot swarms, and open up new and interesting applications for their deployment, such as the monitoring of large bodies of water for pollutants using a swarm of autonomous surface vehicles.

Today's products from many manufacturing industries, notably aerospace, automotive and high-tech manufacturing, depend on embedded software to function. Since many of these products support safety or mission-critical services, the correctness of the embedded software is a paramount concern. Most of today's industrial efforts focus on improving the code review, testing and qualification process to achieve this. Whilst these processes can reveal defects, they cannot prove their absence. Further, finding defects at review, test or even integration time is too late. Significant engineering efforts have already occurred, making further changes complicated, costly, and uncertain. In contrast to testing approaches, formal verification can prove the correctness of software, substantially reducing the need for testing, whilst also increasing reliability. Formal verification has been investigated for three decades, but has matured significantly over the last few years. The proposers believe it is now possible to develop a verification framework that can verify Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) notations such as UML and SysML, which are widely used to develop embedded software. The proposers have previously mapped MDE descriptions in a custom notation into both source code and the process algebra CSP, allowing formal verification using FDR, a model checker also produced by the proposers. This led to verified embedded systems that contained 1M lines of code. This work was limited in the modelling languages, the system architectures, and execution semantics it supported and had no formal proof guaranteeing the source code generated was equivalent to the models being verified. It was also a point solution that could not interoperate with other tools, nor handle legacy code. The overall goal of this proposal is to produce an industrially-applicable framework that supports verification and implementation of MDE languages. We will also develop a proof-of-concept tool that supports our framework and allows both academic and industrial exploitation. At the core of our framework will be a new formal verification language, called Communicating Components (CoCo), that is designed to model embedded software written in MDE languages. FDR will be used to verify models expressed in CoCo; the recent step-change performance improvements in FDR3 mean we will be able to handle more complex components and architectures. We will also provide a translation from CoCo into source code. We will improve the reliability of the source code translator by using the Coq theorem prover to prove the translation preserves the semantics of the model. In addition to the MDE engineers who will benefit from this project, formal methods researchers will also benefit. We will develop new specification-directed abstraction and verification techniques, based on the compositional methods we used in our earlier verification work. Secondly, we will add extra functionality to FDR3 to support this work, and thereby make our work readily accessible to the large FDR3 community. We have assembled an enthusiastic group of industrial partners comprising Aerospace Technology Institute (leader of UK strategy for aerospace), ASML (world's largest supplier of photolithography systems), ASTC (global industry leader for tools and solutions in safety critical and real time control electronics industries), MBDA (world leader in missiles and missile systems) and Rolls-Royce CDS (leading provider of high integrity control systems), who will collaborate with us and provide essential industrial expertise across these industries. This will allow us to ensure that the framework and proof-of-concept tool we produce are industrially applicable. Our partners will also provide case studies and, we hope, ultimately provide users for our technology.