Quo vadis cyber-physical systems: research areas of cyber-physical ecosystems: a position paper

Abstract

Many technological innovations from the research area of dynamic adaptive systems or IT ecosystems are already established in current software systems. Especially cyber-physical systems should benefit by this progress to provide smart applications in ambient environments of private and industrial space. But a proper and methodical engineering of cyber-physical ecosystems (CPES) is still an open and important issue. Traditional software and systems engineering facilities (system models, description languages, or process models) do not consider fundamental characteristics of these ecosystems as openness, uncertainty, or emergent constitution at runtime sufficiently. But especially these aspects let blur the line of system boundaries at design time. The diverse components of CPES have essential impacts on the engineering of CPES as well, concerning time synchronizing, execution control, and interaction structure. Self-balanced control in CPES promises new application possibilities, but also needs new engineering techniques concerning the overall engineering process, including requirements engineering and runtime verification. In this position paper we survey and summarize the dimensions of challenges in applying control theory for the engineering of cyber-physical ecosystems.