A Multidisciplinary Design Methodology for Cyber-physical Systems

Designing cyber-physical systems is a challenge originating from the multidisciplinary and mixed-signal requirements. In order to handle this challenge, many design languages have been developed, but none is able to connect different application domains adequately. This paper proposes a new system based view for cyber-physical system design which can be easily adapted by MARTE or SysML, as it uses a model based design technique. Instead of defining another UML profile, we present an intuitive idea for the development of cyber-physical systems by refinement and introduce new abstraction layers that help to describe operating system and mixed-signal issues. Using new abstraction layers, it is now possible to support all views of the platform based design by using one consistent language. The approach explicitly distinguishes between the physical system and the computational system. The benefit of this new approach is presented in a case study where a cyber-physical system is designed.