Design Space Exploration and Manipulation for Cyber Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) [1] are engineered systems that require tight interaction between physical and computational components. Designing a CPS is highly challenging [2] because these systems are inherently complex, need significant effort to describe and evaluate a vast set of crossdisciplinary interactions, and require seamless meshing of physical elements with corresponding software artifacts. Moreover, a large set of architectural and composable alternatives must be systematically explored and evaluated in the context of a highly constrained design space. The constraints imposed on the selection of alternatives are derived from the system’s functional, performance, dimensional, physical, and economical objectives. Furthermore, the design process of these systems is highly iterative and requires continuous integration of design generation with design selection and manipulation supported by design analyses. Existing computer-aided design tools are not well-suited for this method of design. To facilitate the iterative design process for CPS-s, we have developed a design toolchain, OpenMETA [4] [9], built around a DomainSpecific Modeling Language (DSML) [3], called the Cyber-Physical Modeling Language (CyPhyML). In this paper, we present parts OpenMETA that address the requirements of Design Space Exploration and Manipulation (DSEM) for CPS-s.