Model-Driven Engineering and Semantic Technologies for the Design of Cyber-Physical Systems

Rapid changes in product and system requirements force today's companies to cope with unforeseen adaptations of industrial plants. To enable the implementation of intelligent, self-adapting systems, manufacturing systems must be composed to Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) out of Cyber-Physical Modules (CPMs). However, cross-disciplinary design of CPS and the multitude of persons involved in this process increases complexity in (re-)engineering drastically. Identification and modeling of typical CPM types in a CPM library provides a first step towards enabling reuse of constructed and verified CPMs and, thus, a knowledge base making automatic composition of CPS out of CPMs possible. In this paper, a concept for retrieving existing automation software functionality from a given hardware description by means of model-driven engineering and semantic technologies is presented.