Towards Self-reconfiguration of Real-time Communication within Cyber-physical Systems

Abstract

Abstract Today, in domains like automation and robotics systems consist of various sensors and computation nodes. Due to the temporal dependency in quality of measured data, such Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) commonly have real-time requirements on communication. In addition, these systems shall become more flexible and scalable, e.g., by adding new components to the CPS. This would be most suitable if a CPS could react to the presence of a new component and reconfigure itself to run afterwards with the new component integrated to the CPS. This capability is covered by the term Plug-and-Produce. In this paper, we propose a concept to enable Plug-and-Produce within a CPS whose network uses different communication media, e.g., Ethernet and CAN. In this context, we also introduce our three layered software architecture that supports the proposed concept for self-reconfiguration.