Extensions to pattern formats for cyber physical systems
Antonio Maña, Ernesto Damiani, Sigrid Gürgens, George Spanoudakis · 2014
Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs) are becoming not only increasingly complex but also increasingly important. Traditionally, CPSs were self-contained monolithic systems operating in a well-defined environment. CPSs today have evolved to large-scale systems including multiple interacting components. Due to the inherent complexity of the physical environments where CPSs operate and the ever changing operational and context conditions of these environments, CPSs need to be able to adapt in a semi- or fully autonomic manner. At the same time, in the course of adapting themselves, they need to satisfy key quality, security and privacy (QSP) requirements and be resilient to threats even if those were unknown at the time the CPS was designed. Engineering CPSs with such capabilities is a challenging problem that requires expert knowledge. Our approach to addressing this problem is based on the use of QSP-preserving patterns, i.e., patterns that encode proven design and engineering solutions providing particular QSP properties. We argue that existing pattern formats miss some essential features of CPSs. As a step towards the realization of approach, in this paper we present a new pattern format that enables the representation of most important characteristics of QSP preserving patterns for CPS. Our format provides an initial basis for defining a full pattern language for engineering QSP preserving CPS.