Modeling Basic Aspects of Cyber-Physical Systems
This work addresses the need for better simulation tools in cyber-physical systems design, but it is incremental as it focuses on a preliminary step of language feature assessment.
The paper tackles the problem of identifying necessary language features for modeling cyber-physical systems to reduce costly physical experimentation, and finds that a domain-specific formalism called Acumen is evaluated for its sufficiency through elementary examples.
Designing novel cyber-physical systems entails significant, costly physical experimentation. Simulation tools can enable the virtualization of experiments. Unfortunately, current tools have shortcomings that limit their utility for virtual experimentation. Language research can be especially helpful in addressing many of these problems. As a first step in this direction, we consider the question of determining what language features are needed to model cyber-physical systems. Using a series of elementary examples of cyber-physical systems, we reflect on the extent to which a small, experimental domain-specific formalism called Acumen suffices for this purpose.