Home // International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, volume 16, numbers 3 and 4, 2023 // View article
Authors:
Martin Richter
Christine Jakobs
Theresa Werner
Matthias Werner
Keywords: cyber-physical systems; programming model; context awareness; heterogeneity; virtualization
Abstract:
The emergence of cyber-physical systems leads to an integration of the digital and physical worlds through sensors and actuators. Programming such systems is error-prone and complex as a plethora of different devices is involved, each of which may be mobile and unreliable. In existing approaches, the developer views the world from the digital point of view. He or she has to implicitly interpret digital values as sensor measurements of the environment or as control values, which influence the environment through actuators. This leads to an increase of complexity as the number of sensors and actuators in cyber-physical systems is ever-increasing and different types of devices may become available during the runtime of the system. These devices may be located in different physical contexts that may bear no relation to each other. Therefore, the developer has to take the properties of the environment into account when designing his or her application as he or she has to acknowledge the impact of varying devices being located in different contexts. Additionally, he or she has to consider the coordination of interactions between different types of distributed sensors and actuators. This increases the likelihood of errors in the programmer's implicit interpretations of the digital values. Current approaches mainly focus on providing abstractions from the distribution and heterogeneity of the system, but fail to explicitly address the impact of digital calculations on the physical world and vice versa. We present a programming model, which reverses the view of the developer on the system. It allows him or her, to take the perspective of the physical system of interest and to explicitly describe its desired behavior. Therefore, a virtualization of devices is possible. This allows to transparently handle failing, moving, as well as emerging sensors and actuators.
Pages: 31 to 42
Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2023. Used with permission.
Publication date: December 30, 2023
Published in: journal
ISSN: 1942-2679