Title:  Service-Oriented Reference Model for Cyber-Physical Systems

Committee:

Dr. Marilyn Wolf, ECE, Chair , Advisor

Dr. Magnus Egerstedt, ECE

Dr. Santiago Grijalva, ECE

Dr. George Riley, ECE

Dr. Eric Feron, AE

Abstract: 

This dissertation has formalized a service-oriented computing (SOC) based approach to cyber-physical systems (CPS) in the form of a service-oriented CPS reference model. The proposed reference model extends the traditional SOC paradigm for handling hard real-time CPS aspects by introducing resource-aware service deployment and quality-of-service (QoS)-aware service operation phases along with support for the following formal guarantees: 1) functional equivalence between a CPS design specification and the corresponding service-based CPS field deployment and 2) non-interference between the co-deployed CPS services from the perspective of their timing performance. As a result, the proposed CPS reference model enables a provably-correct process for converting a new CPS application from a CPS design specification to a service-based CPS deployment in the field without affecting the timing performance of already-deployed CPS applications or disrupting the operation of already-deployed CPS applications for system upgrade. Therefore, unlike the traditional task-based reference model from the domains of automotive and avionics, the proposed service-oriented CPS reference model enables disruption-free, incremental system deployment and reconfiguration that are fundamental requirements of the emerging safety-critical but wide-area and "always-online" CPS application domains such as smart grid and vehicular networks.