Conceptual approach for multi-disciplinary cyber physical systems design and engineering

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are able to provide new and smart services as well as opportunities across existing application boundaries. By connecting the physical world to the cyber world, CPS will have a significant impact in human comfort, safety, health, and productivity. However, along with the new opportunities, CPS bring new challenges in design and engineering. Current product development strategies are design domain-specific and lack universality that is specifically required in CPS design. In this paper we conduct a literature research on CPS engineering challenges and discuss quality factors and common weak spots in complex CPS. With this background, we propose a conceptual approach that contributes to the enhancement of existing development methodologies. It covers the CPS-specific requirements by introducing layer based system abstraction and linkage among the technical disciplines. Different structure viewpoints help to design and manage system models in the concept phase of product development as well as to identify sensitive parts that have critical impact on security and safety. The proposed concept is a first step and a base for further research on the development and implementation of new methodologies and tools that improve manageability of complex CPS engineering tasks.