microsoft/accessorframework

A C++ SDK for building cyber-physical applications using the Accessor Model

About

The Accessor Framework is a C++ SDK that empowers cyber-physical system application developers to build their applications using the Accessor Model, a component-based programming model originally conceived by researchers at the Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems Center (iCyPhy) at UC Berkeley.

The Accessor Model enables embedded applications to embrace heterogeneous protocol stacks and be highly asynchronous while still being highly deterministic. This enables developers to have well-defined test cases, rigorous specifications, and reliable error checking without sacrificing the performance gains of multi-threading. In addition, the model eliminates the need for explicit thread management, eliminating the potential for deadlocks and greatly reducing the potential for race conditions and other non-deterministic behavior.

The SDK is designed to be cross-platform. It is written entirely in C++ and has no dependencies other than the C++14 Standard Library.

The research paper that inspired this project can be found at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8343871.

Getting Started

Building from Source

git clone https://github.com/microsoft/AccessorFramework.git
cd AccessorFramework
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build .

Using in a CMake Project

# CMakeLists.txt
project(myProject)

find_package(AccessorFramework REQUIRED)

add_executable(myProject main.cpp)
target_link_libraries(myProject PRIVATE AccessorFramework)

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.opensource.microsoft.com.

When you submit a pull request, a CLA bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., status check, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact [email protected] with any additional questions or comments.

accessorframework's Issues

Add build pipeline

Integrate with the CI/CD pipeline and link build statuses

Add unit tests to verify basic functionality

test cases should include:

• accessor instantiation
• send/receive messages of different data types
• simultaneous messages
• immediate reactions
• delayed reactions
• nested actors

Add builds for ARM and ARM64 on Windows

Output PDB files for Windows builds

Support multiple input sources

Change AtomicAccessor::Impl::ProcessInputs() to process multiple inputs on a single port during each round of execution (but NOT inputs the accessor sends to itself to be processed during the next round, i.e. feedback input). This will unlock support for input ports with multiple sources.

Support dynamic modeling

Currently, accessor models are static; at runtime, ports cannot be added to or removed from accessors, and children cannot be added or removed from parents. Add dynamic modeling so that accessor models can adapt to changing environments such as devices coming online and going offline at runtime.

Use std::chrono::duration for callback scheduling and delays

Currently, callback scheduling and delays are represented as fundamental integer types. Represent them as std::chrono::durations instead to make the callback system more robust.

Add googletest support

Integrate with googletest and add a basic test suite

Cf Lingua Franca

A refinement of accessors is Lingua Franca (see https://github.com/icyphy/lingua-franca ) that you may want to check out. There is a C target and an Accessors target, with the C target being better developed and more mature. Creating a C++ target would be relatively easy, I think.

Add builds for x86, x64, ARM, and ARM64 on Linux

Support building for ARM soft-float