An Architectural approach to Cyber-Physical Systems

Critical physical infrastructures—the power grid, transportation systems, building environments—are distributed physical systems that are monitored and controlled by large networked embedded computing systems that rely on software of ever-growing size and complexity. Unfortunately, today’s models and methods for analysis and design of such systems are typically fragmented along lines defined by disparate mathematical formalisms and dissimilar methodologies in engineering and computer science. As a consequence it is hard to reason about design tradeoffs that span cyber and physical domains, or to understand how to reconcile analyses produced by various formal models. In this talk we describe a new approach in which software architecture models are extended to incorporate physical elements, and to provide a common framework integration framework for analysis using a variety of modeling formalisms, each formalism projected onto its own architectural view of the system.