Cyber-physical systems software development : way of working and tool suite

Abstract

Designing embedded control software for modern cyber-physical systems becomes more and more difficult, because of the increasing amount and complexity of their requirements. The regular requirements are extended with modern requirements, for example, to get a general purpose cyber-physical system capable of fulfilling a variety of different, ad-hoc tasks or to be suitable in environments with lots of human interactions. A typical example of modern cyber-physical systems, which have these modern requirements, are medical robotic systems used in surgeries. The essential goal of this research is to provide a way of working for the design of the control software for cyber-physical systems, and thereby providing a solution of the problem of the increasing complexity of the control software due to the modern requirements described above. The way of working makes use of model-driven design (MDD) techniques to reduce the complexity of the control software design. Additional objectives are to provide a component blue-print, an execution framework and tooling support, all to further decrease the complexity of the designs and to increase the usability of the provided way of working. In the end, it is concluded that the proposed way of working provides design steps for the complete design trajectory, starting at the initial designs up-to and including the deployment of the control software on the target system. It is also concluded that the supporting component blue-print (called Generic Architecture Component, or GAC) tightly matches the way of working and increases its value and usability. The execution framework (called LUNA Universal Network Architecture, or LUNA) and the tool-suite (called Twente Embedded Real-time Robotic Application, or TERRA) further increase the usability of the way of working by adding graphical model-driven design support to the way of working, with e.g. model validation and code generation. This all increases the understanding of the complex models and thus decreasing the complexity of the control software design. It is recommended to further evaluate the way of working, by using it to implement different control applications to steer all kinds of different cyber-physical systems. Furthermore it is recommended to add simulation capabilities and model management to the TERRA tool suite to increase its usability further.