Environmental-Perception Modeling and Reference Architecture for Cyber Physical Systems

Nianyu Li,Kun Liu,Wenpin Jiao,Zhengyin Chen

doi:10.1109/access.2020.3034390

Nianyu Li, Kun Liu + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2020.3034390

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Abstract

In cyber-physical systems, physical and software components are deeply intertwined, blurring the boundaries between the cyber and physical worlds. Perceiving environmental information is a prerequisite for a cyber-physical system to be reliable and adaptive to the environment. However, the intrinsically open and dynamic nature of the environment brings challenges to the systematic realization of environmental-perception. This article regards environmental-perception as a first-class entity with self-maintenance and abstracts it into three levels: data capture, context awareness, and situation identification. Then, a five-tier reference architecture is proposed, which not only explicitly defines the perception ability at different abstraction levels, but also provides for the storage and management of environmental information, thus facilitating information reuse and the adaptation ability of cyber-physical systems. We evaluate the reference architecture with a case study on a widely used smart room environment, demonstrating its broad applicability and the ability to reuse environmental information. We also performed a survey on the proposed reference architecture to reveal its industrial motivations and benefits.

Highlights

In cyber-physical systems (CPS), ‘‘physical and computation components are deeply intertwined, each operating on different spatial and temporal scales, exhibiting multiple and distinct behavioral modalities, and interacting with each other in many ways that change with context.’’1 CPSs blur the boundary and realize the integration between the cyber and physical worlds [1]
The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 summarizes the existing approaches of perceiving environmental-information and presents our new approach regarding the environmental-perception as a first class entity existing independently; Section 3 introduces three levels of environmental-perception and defines its constituents respectively; Section 4 specifies a reference architecture for implementing the three levels with reference to ISO protocols; Section 5 presents a smart room environment example to illustrate how CPS perceives the environment information through our proposed framework and reference architecture; Section 6 includes a survey to further reveal the industrial motivations and benefits of the reference architecture; Section 7 details some related work; Section 8 makes some concluding remarks on this article and points out our future work
ENVIRONMENTAL-PERCEPTION: AN OVERVIEW The environment is the external world for its deployed systems and exists objectively and independently; perceiving environmental information is a prerequisite for a CPS to be reliable and adaptive

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In cyber-physical systems (CPS), ‘‘physical and computation components are deeply intertwined, each operating on different spatial and temporal scales, exhibiting multiple and distinct behavioral modalities, and interacting with each other in many ways that change with context.’’1 CPSs blur the boundary and realize the integration between the cyber and physical worlds [1]. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 summarizes the existing approaches of perceiving environmental-information and presents our new approach regarding the environmental-perception as a first class entity existing independently; Section 3 introduces three levels of environmental-perception and defines its constituents respectively; Section 4 specifies a reference architecture for implementing the three levels with reference to ISO protocols; Section 5 presents a smart room environment example to illustrate how CPS perceives the environment information through our proposed framework and reference architecture; Section 6 includes a survey to further reveal the industrial motivations and benefits of the reference architecture; Section 7 details some related work; Section 8 makes some concluding remarks on this article and points out our future work

ENVIRONMENTAL-PERCEPTION

CASE STUDY

SMART ROOM ENVIRONMENT

EMPIRICAL EVALUATION

Findings

VIII. CONCLUSION