Pragmatic cyber physical systems design based on parametric models

The adaptive nature of cyber physical systems (CPS) comes from the fact that they are deeply immersed in the physical environments that are inherently dynamic. CPS also have stringent requirements on real-time operation and safety that are fulfilled by rigorous model design and verification. In the real-time literature, adaptation is mostly limited to off-line modeling of well known and predicted transitions; but this is not appropriate for cyber physical systems as each transition can have unique and unknown characteristics. In the adaptive systems literature, adaptation solutions are silent about timely execution and about the underlying hardware possibilities that can potentially speed up execution. This paper presents a solution for designing adaptive cyber physical systems by using parametric models that are verified during the system execution (i.e., online), so that adaptation decisions are made based on the timing requirements of each particular adaptation event. Our approach allows the system to undergo timely adaptations that exploit the potential parallelism of the software and its execution over multicore processors. We exemplify the approach on a specific use case with autonomous vehicles communication, showing its applicability for situations that require time-bounded online adaptations.