Control-Based Operating System Design

Control-Based Operating System Design describes the application of system- and control-theoretical methods to the design of computer operating system components. It argues that computer operating system components should not be first 'designed' and then 'endowed with control', but rather when possible conceived from the outset as controllers, synthesised and assessed in the system-theoretical world of dynamic models, and then realised as control algorithms. Doing so is certainly a significant perspective shift with respect to current practices in operating system design, but the payoff is significant too. In some sense, adopting the suggested attitude means viewing computing systems as cyber-physical ones, where the operating system plays the computational role, the physical elements are the managed resources, and the various (control) functionalities to be realised, interact and co-operate as a network.

The book includes both a theoretical treatment of the usefulness of the approach, and the description of a complete implementation in the form of Miosix, a microcontroller kernel made available as free software.

Alberto Leva is Associate Professor of Automatic Control in the Department of Electronics and Information of the Faculty of Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. His main research interests are process modelling, simulation and control, automatic tuning of industrial regulators, and more recently, control and control-based design of computing systems. He is author or co-author of about 120 peer-reviewed publications in international journals or conferences.

Martina Maggio is a postdoctoral researcher at LTH, Lund, Sweden, where her research interests deal with feedback control and control-based design of computing systems.

Alessandro Vittorio Papadopoulos is a PhD student at the Politecnico di Milano, where his research focuses on model reduction and model simplification of nonlinear differential algebraic equation systems, and with the use of advanced control and simulation techniques in the design of computing systems components.

Federico Terraneo is a PhD student at the Politecnico di Milano, where his research interests centre on embedded systems, taking advantage of control-based design and assessment. Since 2008 he is the main developer and maintainer of the Miosix embedded operating system.