Review of Cyber-Physical System Architecture

TLDR

Cyber‑Physical Systems are increasingly studied for their potential to embed intelligence in everyday life, yet their development is hindered by challenges such as integrating heterogeneous devices, ensuring system verification, and guaranteeing security, making a unified architecture essential. This review aims to survey existing CPS architecture research, highlight key challenges and techniques, and propose a Service‑Oriented Architecture that enhances integration flexibility. The authors analyze prior CPS architectural approaches, identify real‑time control, security assurance, and integration mechanisms as core challenges, and design a SOA‑based framework that unifies services and components to address these issues.

Abstract

With the goal of accomplish the ubiquitous intelligence in social life, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are getting growing attentions of researchers and engineers. However, the complexity of computing and physical dynamics bring a lot of challenges in the development of CPS, such as integration of heterogeneous physical devices, system verification, security assurance, and so on. A general or unified architecture plays an important part in the process of CPS design. In this paper, we review the current and previous works of CPS architecture, and introduce the main challenges and techniques of architecture development : real-time control, security assurance, integration mechanism. Then we propose a general CPS architecture based on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), the main advantage of this proposed architecture is the integration flexibility of services and components. At the end, we introduce the typical applications of CPS, and suggest the future research areas.