A Semi-Automated Approach to Foster the Validation of Collaborative Networks of Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems form collaborative networks dynamically at runtime. In the collaboration of multiple systems, behavior emerges in the interplay of the collaborating instances. This emergent behavior raises challenges for the validation of cyber-physical systems’ software, since interoperability of the single systems as well as functional correctness of the entire network of collaborative cyber-physical systems must be validated for all possible configurations of the network. Such network configurations differ, among others, in the number of participating systems, the number of system types involved, and the communication patterns between the participating systems. To aid the validation of behavior emerging from the collaboration, this paper proposes the automated generation of dedicated review diagrams to investigate the collaborative network’s behavior for different network configurations. First evaluations using case examples from industry partners show that the use of such automatically generated instance level review diagrams can support the validation of collaborative cyber-physical systems.