Ensuring safe and consistent coengineering of cyber‐physical production systems: A case study

Abstract

In today's engineering projects, companies continuously have to adapt their systems to changing customers or dynamic market requirements. This requires a flexible, iterative development process in which different parts of the system under construction are built and updated concurrently. However, concurrent engineering becomes quite challenging in domains where different engineering artifacts from different disciplines come into play, such as safety‐critical cyber‐physical systems, where the involved engineering artifacts are quite heterogeneous in nature. In such systems, it is of utmost importance that different artifacts remain consistent in order to guarantee a correctly functioning end product. In this article, we discuss our experiences (with a leading company working in the areas of production automation and product processing) in maintaining the consistency between electrical models and the corresponding software controller, when both are subject to continuous changes. The article discusses how we let engineers describe the relationships between electrical models and the corresponding software controller code in the form of links and consistency rules. Additionally, we demonstrate that how our approach, through a process of continuous consistency checking, notifies engineers about the erroneous impact of their changes in various engineering artifacts.

Multi-paradigm modeling for cyber–physical systems: A systematic mapping review

“…We observed that only 50 (32.7%) of the reviewed papers explicitly report the involved actors or stakeholders. The reviewed papers vary in the number of reported stakeholders: it ranged between reporting one actor (24 studies, 15.7%), to reporting four actors in only one study [89], as shown in Figure 13. Development, design, modeling, and analysis of the system.…”

“…The most common combination of the roles was a System Engineer and Domain Expert, found in 14 papers (9.2%). The single study with four actors [89] describes how a systems engineer, a design tool user, a domain expert, and an assurance expert can collaborate on electrical models, source code, and spreadsheets using a specialized IDE.…”

Context modeling for cyber‐physical systems

“…Traditional implicit and single‐system context consideration is hence no longer sufficient to design CPS that will seamlessly, safely, and securely integrate into an existing runtime environment 24 . This is because traditional systems development approaches assume a “closed world” 25 ; that is, presuppose that the context the system will be deployed in can be fully understood (and documented) at design time.…”

“…We suggest that explicitly documenting facts and assumption about the system's context (which, in the following, we call “context information”) allows engineers to anticipate what happens when changes occur in the context at runtime. When explicitly documenting this context information alongside the regular engineering artifacts, permissible context configurations can be captured, which are known to retain adequate, safe, and secure functionality 24,29 . This can, for example, aid safety analysis and runtime adaptation, 30 as we will show in Section 6.…”

Multifaceted Consistency Checking of Collaborative Engineering Artifacts

“…A team-oriented engineering effort, however, demands a similar team-oriented consistency checking workflow (i.e., one-to-many consistency checking). Though this endeavor is an ongoing research challenge [4], [7].…”