ESCET / CIF

The Eclipse Supervisory Control Engineering Toolkit (Eclipse ESCET™) supports a Synthesis-Based Engineering approach for the development of supervisory controllers, which combines model-driven engineering with computer-aided design. This leads to higher-quality controllers at lower effort and cost compared to traditional development.

Eclipse ESCET supports efficient and cost-effective design and implementation of correct-by-construction controllers. The ESCET toolkit features the CIF language and tools, which provide:

Precise behaviour modelling

A powerful declarative modelling language for the specification of discrete event, timed and hybrid systems.

Complete engineering toolchain

An extensive toolset that supports the entire development process of controllers, including among others specification, supervisory controller synthesis, simulation-based validation and visualization, verification, real-time testing, and code generation.

Automatically synthesized control

A Synthesis-Based Engineering (SBE) approach that enables automatic generation of correct-by-construction supervisory controller models and implementations.

Further information on the SBE method. The following video gives a brief introduction to SBE and compares it to alternative engineering approaches.

Main benefits

Eclipse ESCET combines model-driven engineering with computer-aided design, which helps to tackle the increasing complexity of supervisory controllers: automatically detect issues such as conflicting requirements, perform early validation and verification (shift-left), synthesize correct-by-construction controllers for every configuration and scenario, and generate implementations for various platforms and languages.

The CIF language and tooling supports SBE, which allows producing unambiguous, complete, consistent, and up-to-date control specifications, leading to higher quality controllers at similar or even lower effort and costs compared to more traditional engineering approaches. This holds especially for larger and more complex systems, where it is more difficult to consider all the situations that may occur, and how they impact the requirements.

Open-source project

CIF has been developed by the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) since 2006. Since 2020 it is part of the Eclipse ESCET open-source project at the Eclipse Foundation. A growing community of researchers, users, developers, and tool vendors – including TNO-ESI – collaborate in an open setting on further innovations and adoption of the SBE approach and ESCET toolkit.

Go to the Eclipse ESCET website

Further information