Triton: a domain specific language for cyber-physical systems

Abstract

The design of cyber-physical systems is non-trivial and often filled with tedious, error-prone tasks that could be represented in a better way. Engineers often work with low-level languages such as C and C++, with real-time operating systems under limited computational resources, which requires extensive domain-specific knowledge. This work proposes Triton, a language focused on increasing abstraction by providing high-level domain-specific features to cyber-physical systems. We propose dedicated code blocks to handle task scheduling, constraint management, and computational offloading at the language level. Triton provides an easy way to offload tasks with bidirectional communication channels to enable continuous streaming of data between the master application and the tasks it offloads. Triton's prototype implementation targets the Java virtual machine (JVM), supporting execution on any platform with an available JVM. Experiments and example code provided shows the effectiveness of the proposed solution when compared with languages traditionally seen in cyber-physical systems development.