Abstract
The development of Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) draws more interest from both researchers and industrial practitioners considering the opportunities they offer in almost all areas of industry. However, the engineering and management of CPS are challenging tasks due to their inherent heterogeneity and complexity characteristics. Regarding the development of CPS, there currently exists no standard methodology owing to the complexity of the domain. One of the key approaches to reduce the development complexity for CPS is Model-driven Engineering (MDE), which is frequently used in many industrial domains for software development to increase the level of platform abstraction. Nevertheless, it is always almost challenging, especially for the new researchers in this field, to determine the appropriate tools and languages to perform a particular MDE activity during CPS development. To the best of our knowledge, there is no guideline that demonstrates which language(s)/tool(s) to use for the various MDE techniques/phases for the development of CPS. This paper presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) study that focuses on identifying and classifying the recent research practices pertaining to CPS development by applying MDE approaches. With the objective of providing a general overview of the field, the study evaluates 140 research papers published during 2010–2018. Accordingly, a precise view of the various MDE tools and languages used in the development life-cycle of CPS, addressed MDE techniques/activities, and targeted CPS components is presented. We believe that the conducted study will guide researchers and practitioners to identify appropriate tools and languages according to the system requirements. It may also help in getting an overall understanding of the research trends for further research and development on the MDE of CPS.
Highlights
Significant challenges come across developers of Cyberphysical systems (CPS) due to their heterogeneous nature, such as the need for knowledge and skills from multiple academic disciplines, the integration of the artifacts of these disciplines, and the difficulty of the maintenance activities of such heterogeneous artifacts
RELATED WORK Since the scope of this study is to present an Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on the stateof-the-art of Model-driven Engineering (MDE) tools and languages for CPS, the related secondary studies (surveys, systematic mapping (SM), SLR, and Tertiary Studies) are addressed as the related work
The CPS research community can consider increasing the number of the publicly available MDE tools to facilitate the dissemination of these tools and provide the adoption of them in various industry fields
Summary
Significant challenges come across developers of Cyberphysical systems (CPS) due to their heterogeneous nature, such as the need for knowledge and skills from multiple academic disciplines, the integration of the artifacts of these disciplines, and the difficulty of the maintenance activities of such heterogeneous artifacts. There is a need for a methodology that permits efficient raise of the abstraction level to overcome issues of heterogeneity induced by the multidisciplinary nature of such systems. Towards this goal, many researchers believe that MDE is a better alternative solution to overcome challenges such as development complexity, heterogeneity, adaptability, and reuse and they propose various applications of MDE for CPS development The controllers/software make decisions/actions based on the received data from the sensors and send them through communication elements to actuators which in return make changes to the physical phenomena [12], [13], the feedback loop.
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