A case study on modularity violations in cyber-physical systems

Lu Xiao, Michael J. Pennock, Joana L.F.P. Cardoso, Xiao Wang

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    2 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    In recent years, cyber-physical systems (CPS) have been widely used in different problem domains. The hardware and software components in a CPS are deeply intertwined at various levels of abstraction under changing contexts to achieve the desired goals. One way to manage this complexity is through the use of modular architecture that enables portions of a CPS to be upgraded, replaced, or fixed in a plug-and-play manner. In practice, nominally modular architectures depart from this ideal. Thus, there is a need to identify, measure, and understand the causes of these departures. Techniques have been developed to accomplish this for pure software systems, but can these techniques be adapted to infer hardware-related modularity violations in a CPS? To investigate this question, we adapted methods from pure-software systems and analyzed two open-source CPS: OpenWrt and MD PnP. We found that the software architecture of these systems is well modularized. However, we were able to detect and measure modularity violations associated with hardware and other domain-related concepts. Furthermore, software components related to hardware were more likely to change frequently compared to general software components. Together, these findings suggest that it is feasible to identify a subset of hardware-driven modularity violations using techniques adapted from pure software systems.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)338-349
    Number of pages12
    JournalSystems Engineering
    Volume23
    Issue number3
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 1 May 2020

    Keywords

    • change propagation
    • cyber-physical system
    • modularity

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'A case study on modularity violations in cyber-physical systems'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this