Feature-Based Prognosis of Performance and Cost Implications of Cyber-Physical Systems: An Illustration of Theory and Process

Abstract

Prognosis and planning for the future life cycles is critical for both customers and developers of complex systems such as cyber-physical systems (CPSs). There are often uncertainties regarding the eventual costs and performances of CPSs. Having in advance a clear sense of the expected costs and performance is vital in the early development phases for decisions on, e.g., which functional features the CPS should have, whether to proceed with the development process, or whether to own a CPS or product. We focus specifically on prognosis of functional performance and cost implications of CPSs. The problem is that the available forecasting approaches cannot be used straightaway to tradeoff between costs and benefits, or to predict the benefits of investment in the early phases of the processes of development of CPSs. As a first step in an attempt to deal with these challenges, we have developed a feature-based reference scheme for deriving aspects and criteria for forecasting functional performance and cost implications of CPSs. We illustrate the applicability of the proposed scheme in this paper. We used this scheme as the basis for deriving the aspects and criteria for forecasting functional performance and cost implications of a cyber-physical printing utility. The scheme provided a systematic way of acquiring and formulating the aspects and criteria, and of figuring out the features that a cyber-physical printing utility should encompass. Overall, it helps to reduce the chance of overlooking the aspects and criteria.