Model-Driven Development of Heterogeneous Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are becoming more prevalent for the reliable execution of critical tasks, e.g., in the aerospace and medical fields. The development of such systems is challenging, due to the heterogeneity of the components ranging from sensors and embedded controllers to cloud solutions. Model-driven approaches can provide a high-level abstraction to combat the challenges. This paper proposes a model-driven development approach supporting the precise modeling of CPS and the automatic derivation of implementation from the resulting models. The approach introduces a composition semantics tailored to heterogeneous architectures for the precise description of component interactions. Automated code generators allow the execution of standalone software components on real-time controllers and support the synthesis of standalone hardware components, enabling both the derivation of embedded software and the description of logical circuit behavior. Component interactions are supported by multiple communication solutions generally used in critical, real-time embedded systems. The approach is implemented in the Gamma framework and its applicability is demonstrated in two case studies.