A hierarchical domain model for safety-critical cyber-physical systems in process automation

Abstract

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) integrate computation with physical processes. For the last years, CPS have been in the focus of research and are getting adopted in multiple domains like health care, automotive and smart factories. The use of CPS promises dynamic adaption of systems to changing environmental and economic conditions through autonomous CPS decisions based on the physical process. In industrial process automation, research and adoption of CPS have to account for the severe safety restrictions that dominate the system design in this domain. To transfer the benefits of CPS application to process automation, the CPS must be able to formally verify the safety of its autonomous reconfiguration decisions. This paper proposes a domain model for safety-critical CPS in industrial process automation to serve as foundation for formal CPS algorithms.