Triton: a Domain Specific Language for Cyber-Physical Systems

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++, real-time operating systems, or straight on the metal under limited hardware constraints which requires engineers to have extensive domain specific knowledge. In this paper, we propose Triton, which is a language focused on increasing abstraction by providing high-level domain-specific features to engineers working on cyber-physical systems and IoT devices through a domain specific language (DSL). We propose dedicated code blocks to handle task scheduling at the language level, with the addition of a constraint system to handle faults, such as erroneous sensor data. Triton integrates with the Remote Method Delegation (RMD) platform to allow the developer to easily offload work to the cloud, in addition to providing native support for publish-subscribe network communications. The Triton prototype has been implemented for the JVM target, allowing for interroperability with other JVM languages and supports execution on any platform with an available JVM. Example code provided shows a clear reduction in boilerplate and a simple case-study shows the effectiveness of the proposed solution when compared with languages traditionally seen in embedded or cyber-physical systems development.