Cyber-physical modeling and simulation: A reference architecture for designing demonstrators for industrial cyber-physical systems

TLDR

Models and simulations are well established in systems engineering and development. The authors propose cyber‑physical modeling and simulation (CPMS) to enable scalable, modular, and variable‑size cyber‑physical systems. They derive a reference architecture for designing industrial CPS demonstrators and demonstrate its viability by creating the Portable Industrial Demonstrator for Cyber‑Physical Systems (PID4CPS). The reference architecture provides a structured design space and component attributes that align demonstrators with application objectives and scenarios.

Abstract

The application of models and simulations is well-established in systems engineering and development. To adapt this approach to the digital age, we propose the concept of “cyber-physical modeling and simulation (CPMS)” which enables to constitute cyber-physical systems (CPS) with scalable complexity, modularity and variability in size. Based thereon, we derive a reference architecture for designing demonstrators for industrial CPS. The reference architecture offers a structured design space and attributed components which constitute the demonstrators with regard to their application objectives and scenarios. As a viability assessment, we apply the proposed reference architecture by developing the instantiation “Portable Industrial Demonstrator for Cyber-Physical Systems (PID4CPS)”.