Towards a Taxonomy for Eliciting Design-Operation Continuum Requirements of Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

Software systems that are embedded in autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) usually have a large life-cycle, both during its development and in maintenance. This software evolves during its life-cycle in order to incorporate new requirements, bug fixes, and to deal with hardware obsolescence. The current process for developing and maintaining this software is very fragmented, which makes developing new software versions and deploying them in the CPSs extremely expensive. In other domains, such as web engineering, the phases of development and operation are tightly connected, making it possible to easily perform software updates of the system, and to obtain operational data that can be analyzed by engineers at development time. However, in spite of the rise of new communication technologies (e.g., 5G) providing an opportunity to acquire Design-Operation Continuum Engineering methods in the context of CPSs, there are still many complex issues that need to be addressed, such as the ones related with hardware-software co-design. Therefore, the process of Design-Operation Continuum Engineering for CPSs requires substantial changes with respect to the current fragmented software development process. In this paper, we build a taxonomy for Design-Operation Continuum Engineering of CPSs based on case studies from two different industrial domains involving CPSs (elevation and railway). This taxonomy is later used to elicit requirements from these two case studies in order to present a blueprint on adopting Design-Operation Continuum Engineering in any organization developing CPSs.

Machine learning‐based test oracles for performance testing of cyber‐physical systems: An industrial case study on elevators dispatching algorithms

“…Usually, requirements are defined based on (1) new legislative standards from the elevation domain that require changes and (2) new customer needs. Customer needs might be F I G U R E 2 Software development process of Orona's dispatching algorithms 2 F I G U R E 1 Overview of the architecture of an elevator installation from Orona 17 different depending on the type of building where the elevator needs to be installed. For instance, a hospital might require a special emergency button that will enable transporting critical patients through the building.…”

Towards Aspect Based Components Integration Framework for Cyber-Physical System

“…The development process of CPSs requires close integration and vigilant coordination of many components. The [9] have focused on elicitation analysis and designing CPSs. There is still a need to rank and prioritize scenarios that are produced while performing the trade-off analysis procedure Previously available requirements of security frameworks did not fulfill the needs of CPS security requirements.…”

“…Advancements in technological infrastructures introduce new challenges for software development processes and methodologies. The recent popularity of smart systems and the internet of things domains have highlighted the importance of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), which exhibit a complex interplay among hardware components, associated software, and related processes to fulfill requirements of end-users across different domains [6][7][8][9]. CPSs require real-time integration of different components to perform their assigned tasks in real-time environment [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11].…”

“…The recent popularity of smart systems and the internet of things domains have highlighted the importance of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), which exhibit a complex interplay among hardware components, associated software, and related processes to fulfill requirements of end-users across different domains [6][7][8][9]. CPSs require real-time integration of different components to perform their assigned tasks in real-time environment [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. We can categorize CPS components based on either organization or behavior of the components, as shown in Fig.…”

Multi-Fidelity Digital Twins: a Means for Better Cyber-Physical Systems Testing?

“…Because of the increase on both the complexity and the autonomy of CPSs (which increasingly incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to control complex and often safety-critical tasks), limiting CPSs verification and validation tasks to these levels might be reckless. Furthermore, the software of CPSs has a long lifecycle (over 20 years in industries like railway and elevation [7]. Subsequently, embedded software evolves while the system is in operation to deal with (1) legislation changes, (2) bugs found in production, (3) new functionalities demanded by the end user, (4) hardware obsolescence, etc.…”