A Systematic Approach for Developing Cyber Physical Systems

Cyber physical systems (CPSs) are pervasive in our daily life from mobile phones to auto driving cars. CPSs are inherently complex due to their sophisticated behaviors and thus difficult to build. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach to develop CPSs with quality assurance throughout the development process. A CPS is abstracted and partitioned into a set of independent executing agents, where each agent is further refined into a set of behaviors. Each behavior is modeled with a high level Petri net, called behavior net. The overall behavior of an agent is modeled by an agent through composing individual behavior nets. Finally, the overall system behavior is modeled by a system net through integrating individual agent nets incrementally. Simulation and model checking can be performed on individual behavior nets, agent nets, and the final system net. The resulting system net is systematically mapped to behavior programs in Java, which are enhanced and extended with domain specific functionality. A set of property patterns based on behavior program is developed, which are used to generate runtime monitors to check behavior program executions. We demonstrate our approach using a multi-car parking system.