Towards Intelligent System Health Management using Runtime Monitoring

Abstract

System health management is an important feature of autonomy, enhancing consistency checks, overall system robustness and even some degree of self-awareness. Seemingly unrelated, debugging and analysis of such complex systems is another challenge during development that should not be underrated. We propose that the so-called runtime monitoring of relevant properties and system requirements is a viable technique to support both aforementioned concepts. A suitable monitoring approach for a cyber-physical system has to be efficient and capable of supervising various specifications, possibly relating different data sources and data history. We present a formal approach for log-analysis and monitoring for the DLR ARTIS framework using the stream-based specification language LOLA, currently developed at Saarland University, for the runtime monitoring of formal specifications. We have evaluated this approach by specifying relevant properties as LOLA stream equations. While we have identified a number of possible improvements in the specification language, we have demonstrated, even with the current language, that online and offline monitoring of relevant properties is indeed possible and gives engineers a powerful tool for debugging as well as implementing health management concepts.