An Architecture Framework for Experimentations with Self-Adaptive Cyber-physical Systems

Recent advances in embedded devices capabilities and wireless networks paved the way for creating ubiquitous Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) grafted with self-configuring and self-adaptive capabilities. As these systems need to strike a balance between dependability, open-endedness and adaptability, and operate in dynamic and opportunistic environments, their design and development is particularly challenging. We take an architecture-based approach to this problem and advocate the use of component-based abstractions and related machinery to engineer self-adaptive CPS. Our approach is structured around DEECo -- a component framework that introduces the concept of component ensembles to deal with the dynamicity of CPS at the middleware level. DEECo provides the architecture abstractions of autonomous components and component ensembles on top of which different adaptation techniques can be deployed. This makes DEECo a vehicle for seamless experiments with self-adaptive systems where the physical distribution and mobility of nodes, and the limited data availability play an important role.