Multi-paradigm modeling for cyber–physical systems: A systematic mapping review

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2021.111081Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Comprehensive analysis of modeling approaches for cyber-physical systems (CPSs).

  • A systematic mapping study covering a decade of research literature on CPS.

  • Multi-paradigm modeling is essential, yet challenges remain in model. integration

  • Stakeholders background and education largely not reported or considered in selected studies.

  • Data sets are publicly available ().

Abstract

Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS) are heterogeneous and require cross-domain expertise to model. The complexity of these systems leads to questions about prevalent modeling approaches, their ability to integrate heterogeneous models, and their relevance to the application domains and stakeholders. The methodology for Multi-Paradigm Modeling (MPM) of CPS is not yet fully established and standardized, and researchers apply existing methods for modeling of complex systems and introducing their own. No systematic review has been previously performed to create an overview of the field on the methods used for MPM of CPS. In this paper, we present a systematic mapping study that determines the models, formalisms, and development processes used over the last decade. Additionally, to determine the knowledge necessary for developing CPS, our review studied the background of actors involved in modeling and authors of surveyed studies. The results of the survey show a tendency to reuse multiple existing formalisms and their associated paradigms, in addition to a tendency towards applying transformations between models. These findings suggest that MPM is becoming a essential approach to model CPS, and highlight the importance of future integration of models, standardization of development process and education.

Section snippets

Motivation and background

Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS) are systems that integrate computation, networking, and physical processes. The key characteristic of CPS is their seamless integration of both hardware and software resources for computational, communication, and control purposes, all of which are co-designed with the physically engineered components (Lun et al., 2019b). Engineering CPS requires physical models, computational models, and network models. Physical models presented as continuous-time models are

Multi-Paradigm Modeling for Cyber–Physical Systems

The above considerations lead to Multi-Paradigm Modeling (MPM) for CPS (MPM4CPS) — a school of thought that advocates the combination of reusable modular modeling languages with different paradigms instead of using a single monolithic language for the whole system (Vangheluwe et al., 2002). The term MPM actually finds its origin in the Modeling and Simulation community in 1996, when the EU ESPRIT Basic Research Working Group 8467 Simulation in Europe (SiE) formulated a collection of research

Research method and review process

The methodology used in this Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) follows the process suggested by Kitchenham, 2007, Kitchenham et al., 2009 (see Fig. 1). The review process has three main phases: planning, conducting and reporting. This SMS was performed by researchers (Ph.D. students, Post-Docs, Professors and Research Engineers) from various universities, research institutions, and industry, from ten countries: Portugal, Serbia, Sweden, France, Turkey, the Netherlands, the United States, Belgium,

Multi-paradigm Modeling (MPM) approaches (RQ1)

In this section, we present the findings for RQ1: What multi-paradigm modeling approaches exist for CPS? For this, we focus on four sub-questions that are the completeness of the approach with respect to the supported development activities, the modeled CPS components, the employed formalisms and the integration mechanism to support combining the different employed modeling languages and their tools. Each of these question is addressed in the following subsections.4

Presentation of MPM4CPS approaches (RQ2)

In this section, we present the findings for our second research question RQ2: How are multi-paradigm modeling approaches for building CPS presented?. All primary studies (in total 153) were classified to report modeling approaches for building a CPS as it was an inclusion criteria. We analyzed which parts of CPS were modeled, and which qualities were considered in modeling approaches. Next, we analyzed which approaches report models and meta models, which tools and modeling languages are used

Application domains for CPS (RQ3)

In this section, we present the findings for RQ3: What CPS application domains have been modeled?. The analysis shows that one third of the classified papers (51 papers) present domain-specific approaches, while a majority of the papers (102 papers) propose domain-independent approaches, meaning that they are applicable to CPS in general.

Eight main application domains were suggested for the reviewers based on Gunes et al. classification (Gunes et al., 2014). The studies which do not fall in any

Profiles of stakeholders involved in CPS modeling (RQ4)

This section reports the results of the question RQ4: What is the profile of the person performs CPS modeling? We observed that only 50 (32.7%) of the reviewed papers explicitly report the involved actors or stakeholders. The reviewed papers vary in the number of reported stakeholders: it ranged between reporting one actor (24 studies, 15.7%), to reporting four actors in only one study (Tröls et al., 2020), as shown in Fig. 13.

The actors reported in the reviewed papers are categorized into the

Quality assessment and demographics of classified studies

In this section, we report results regarding the quality assessment of classified studies. The results are detailed in Table 12. To characterize the first quality assessment criteria (QA1) (ranking of journal or conference), we decided to use the CORE (2020) and Scimago ranking (2020) ranks lists. Venues which were not registered at the portal were marked as ’0-Unranked’, where the highest number of papers were published (45.10% comprised of 69 papers), which was expected since we surveyed

Summary of results

Details about analyzed and filtered data associated with our results can be found in our complementary submission (Barišić et al., 0000) associated with online data repository.6 We observe that the number of studies reporting multi-paradigm modeling of CPS is increasing constantly until the year of 2017, from which we can note the drop off on the number of the studies. Not to jump to conclusions, this drop off can be impacted due to the two search

Threats to validity

In this section, we discuss the main threats to validity in our study and how they were mitigated during the MPM4CPS SMS process.

Related work

Multiple literature reviews have been produced on different topics in software engineering, but so far none has been conducted that investigates MPM of CPS, nor do they study the background of authors or developers. An original contribution of our effort is that for the first time in this research field, we have followed an SMS method to be as objective as possible in our selection of primary studies as we mentioned before. In this section, we review the literature surveys that were excluded

Conclusion and future work

This paper presents a systematic mapping study on multi-paradigm modeling for cyber–physical systems. A total of 560 primary studies have been reviewed by 17 researchers from different academic institutions and companies. The presented results were obtained from the analysis of 386 relevant primary studies, and can help researchers and practitioners to orient themselves to address open challenges, and as guide towards specific solutions for their problems.

We observed that most of the approaches

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Ankica Barišić: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Project administration. Ivan Ruchkin: Validation, Supervision, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Writing – review & editing. Dušan Savić: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft,

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by MPM4CPS IC1404 COST action and partially supported by NOVA LINCS with the support of FCT Portuguese national funds (UID/CEC/04516/2019) and the Knowledge Foundation in Sweden through the MINEStrA (nr. 20170133) and SACSys (nr. 20190021) projects.

We would like to thank Prof. Paulo Carreira, Prof. Geylani Kardas, Prof. Ivan Lukovic, and Prof. Mauro Iacono for their feedback during the construction of the protocol. We thank Prof. Vasco Amaral, Prof. Miguel Goulao,

Ankica Barišić is postdoctoral researcher at Université Côte d’Azur, INRIA Sophia-Antipolis Méditerranée research center (France). She obtained a Ph.D. degree in computer science, specializing in software systems, from Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal) in 2017 and M.Sc. degree in mathematics, specializing in computer science, from the University of Zagreb (Croatia) in 2010. She has both academic and industry experience. Her research focus is in Software Engineering, particularly related to

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  • Cited by (18)

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    Ankica Barišić is postdoctoral researcher at Université Côte d’Azur, INRIA Sophia-Antipolis Méditerranée research center (France). She obtained a Ph.D. degree in computer science, specializing in software systems, from Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal) in 2017 and M.Sc. degree in mathematics, specializing in computer science, from the University of Zagreb (Croatia) in 2010. She has both academic and industry experience. Her research focus is in Software Engineering, particularly related to contributing to new modeling techniques, as well as systematically evaluating them. The core of her research work is on three interrelated topics, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) and Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) which are applied to Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS).

    Ivan Ruchkin is a postdoctoral researcher at the PRECISE center at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a Ph.D. degree in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2019. His research interests are in modeling, analysis, and verification of cyber–physical systems (CPS). In the recent past, Dr. Ruchkin developed logic-based methods and automated tools to relate and integrate heterogeneous models of CPS.

    Dušan Savic, is an Assistant Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Organizational Sciences, Department of Software Engineering. He received a Ph.D. degree from the Faculty of Organizational Sciences in Belgrade in 2016. His major research interests are in the areas of information systems, software engineering, model-driven engineering and requirement engineering with multidisciplinary application domains. He has taught undergraduate and graduate-level courses: introduction to programming, software design, software patterns, advanced java technologies, engineering requirements. He is one of the founders of the Laboratory and Department of Software Engineering at the Faculty of Organizational Sciences.

    Mustafa Abshir Mohamed received his B.Sc. degree in Information Communication Technology (ICT) from Gollis University (Somaliland/Somalia) in 2015. From 2015 to 2016, he was a software developer at Gollis university. He is currently doing MS.c. in Information Technologies from International Computer Institute at Ege University (Turkey).

    Rima Al-Ali is a Ph.D. student at Department of Distributed and Dependable systems, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. Her research focus is on uncertainty in cyber–physical systems and self-adaptive systems.

    Letitia W. Li is a principal scientist at FAST Labs, BAE Systems. Her research interests include Model-Driven Engineering and formal verification. Dr. Li received a Ph.D degree in Computer Science from Telecom Paris in collaboration with Institut Vedecom in 2018 for her work on model-based design of safe and secure embedded systems focusing on autonomous vehicles, creating the architectural security modeling and verification profile of the toolkit TTool. She received her masters degree and a bachelors degree of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    Hana Mkaouar obtained an engineering degree in Computer Science in 2013 and a Ph.D. in Computer Systems Engineering in 2019 from the National School of Engineers of Sfax (Tunisia). She is a postdoc researcher at TELECOM-Paris (Palaiseau, France) since November 2018. Her research interests focus on software engineering, model transformation, real-time systems, architecture description languages and formal verification.

    Raheleh Eslampanah received her B.Sc., and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from IAU-Arak University (Iran) in 2003 and 2007 respectively (with rank). Also, She received the Victoria University (Australia) postgraduate award in February 2010 and has completed her Ph.D in 2016. She has joined the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering of Izmir University of Economics (IEU), Turkey since Feb 2016. She is currently a post-doc researcher at the University of Antwerp. Her research interests include Software-defined radio, VLSI design and mixed-signal circuits for wireless applications.

    Moharram Challenger received his Ph.D. in IT from International Computer Institute at Ege University (Turkey) in Feb 2016. He also received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in computer engineering and software engineering from IAU-Shabestar and IAU-Arak Universities (Iran) in 2001 and 2005 respectively. He is currently a post-doc researcher at the University of Antwerp working in a Flanders Make project, called PACo. He was involved in 16 academic/industrial research projects and has published more than 20 journal articles and more than 60 conference/workshop papers. His research interests include model-driven engineering, multi-agent systems, cyber–physical systems, and the Internet of Things.

    Dominique Blouin obtained an M. Sc. in physics from the University of British Columbia (Canada) in 1994 and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of South-Brittany (France) in 2013. After a post doc in the system analysis and modeling group of the Hasso Plattner institute in Potsdam (Germany), he joined the LTCI lab in 2016 as a research engineer at Telecom Paris. His research interests are multi-paradigm modeling, model management, model transformation and synchronization, bi-directional transformation, domain-specific languages, requirements engineering and cyber–physical systems.

    Oksana Nikiforova received the doctoral degree in information technologies (system analysis, modeling and design) from Riga Technical University, Latvia, in 2001. She is presently a professor at the Department of Applied Computer Science, Riga Technical University, where she has been on the faculty since 1997. Her current research interests include object-oriented system analysis, design and modeling, especially the issues in Model Driven Software Development.

    Antonio Cicchetti is an associate professor at Malardalen University. His research interests target component-based and model-driven software engineering in industrial settings, including model versioning, metamodeling, model transformations and multi-view/distributed development.

    Editor: Heiko Koziolek.

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