SFB 1608: Consistency in the View-Based Development of Cyber-Physical Systems

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Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) integrate computational processes with physical processes. The term encompasses many different kinds of systems like cars, trains, aircrafts, and modern smart home systems, which share competing requirements on openness and connectivity, increased software-implemented functionality, flexible configurability, as well as dependability and resilience, all in a cost-effective way during every phase of their lifetime. The limitations of current CPS design approaches become obvious when trying to fulfil these demands simultaneously. The central concept to cope with the ever-increasing complexity of CPS, alongside functional decomposition, is the definition of views which enable the specialisation of developer roles. However, while dealing with component dependencies is well researched, the unsolved scientific challenge of view consistency is the central reason for the need for trade-offs between configurability, functionality, dependability, and cost-effectiveness. The aim of this CRC is to develop a general, comprehensive understanding of view consistency and mechanisms to detect and, when possible, automatically or interactively resolve consistency violations between views in CPS design. Therefore, we will investigate how to extend, generalise, and transfer work in the area of view consistency in software engineering to systems engineering. The CRC will be formed around the methodological core of a so-called virtual single underlying meta-model that has been investigated by the applicants. We see a window of opportunity as mature meta-models in non-software domains now get standardised. This gives us the chance to research the extension of our software engineering approach to non-software views of CPS. We will concurrently work in three research areas: (A) we will formalise different kinds of consistency, according to the needs of the other research areas, and investigate their properties; (B) we will reflect these insights in the definition of fundamental mechanisms for consistency management such as defining view types and supporting concurrent changes; and (C) we will deliver objectives to the other research areas and validate their results by investigating the use of consistency management to address existing challenges in CPS design, such as handling dependencies between product generations, supporting evolution and testing of variable systems, or performing incremental homologation. Over the funding periods, we will transfer the methodology to non-software views, generalise it to maintain consistency of a larger number of views and to a second application area to understand domain-specific needs, and finally embed it in new agile methods for the development and evolution of highly configurable, yet dependable, CPS with fast update cycles. These methods will support engineers in designing CPS that obviate the aforementioned trade-offs between configurability, functionality, dependability, and cost-effectiveness.