Context: New software development patterns are emerging aiming at accelerating the process of delivering value. One is Continuous Experimentation, which allows to systematically deploy and run instrumented software variants during development phase in order to collect data from the field of application. While currently this practice is used on a daily basis on web-based systems, technical difficulties challenge its adoption in fields where computational resources are constrained, e.g., cyber-physical systems and the automotive industry. Objective: This paper aims at providing an overview of the engagement on the Continuous Experimentation practice in the context of cyber-physical systems. %To provide an understanding of what is the state-of-the-art of the Continuous Experimentation practice in the context of cyber-physical systems, and what is the practitioners' feedback about this practice. Method: A systematic literature review has been conducted to investigate the link between the practice and the field of application. Additionally, an industrial multiple case study is reported. Results: The study presents the current state-of-the-art regarding Continuous Experimentation in the field of cyber-physical systems. The current perspective of Continuous Experimentation in industry is also reported. Conclusions: The field has not reached maturity yet. More conceptual analyses are found than solution proposals and the state-of-practice is yet to be achieved. However it is expected that in time an increasing number of solutions will be proposed and validated.
Awareness of cybersecurity topics facilitates software developers to produce secure code. This awareness is especially important in industrial environments for the products and services in critical infrastructures. In this work, we address how to raise awareness of software developers on the topic of secure coding. We propose the "CyberSecurity Challenges", a serious game designed to be used in an industrial environment and address software developers' needs. Our work distils the experience gained in conducting these CyberSecurity Challenges in an industrial setting. The main contributions are…
Industrial automation systems (IASs) are commonly developed using the languages defined by the IEC 61131 standard and are executed on PLCs. In this paper, a system-based approach for the development of IASs is adopted. A framework is described to refine the UML model of the software part, which is extracted from the SysML system model, and get the implementation code. Two implementation alternatives are considered to exploit PLCs but also the recent deluge of embedded boards in the market. For PLC targets, the new version of IEC 61131 that supports Object-Orientation is adopted, while Java is …
Awareness of cybersecurity topics, e.g., related to secure coding guidelines, enables software developers to write secure code. This awareness is vital in industrial environments for the products and services in critical infrastructures. In this work, we introduce and discuss a new serious game designed for software developers in the industry. This game addresses software developers' needs and is shown to be well suited for raising secure coding awareness of software developers in the industry. Our work results from the experience of the authors gained in conducting more than ten CyberSecurity…
The benefits that arise from the adoption of a systems engineering approach to the design of engineered systems are well understood and documented. However , with software systems, different approaches are required given the changeability of requirements and the malleability of software. With the design of industrial cyber-physical systems, one is confronted with the challenge of designing engineered systems that have a significant software component. Furthermore, that software component must be able to seamlessly interact with both the enterprise's business systems and industrial systems. In …
We describe our ongoing work and view on simulation, validation and visualization of cyber-physical systems in industrial automation during development, operation and maintenance. System models may represent an existing physical part - for example an existing robot installation - and a software simulated part - for example a possible future extension. We call such systems cyber-virtual systems. In this paper, we present the existing VITELab infrastructure for visualization tasks in industrial automation. The new methodology for simulation and validation motivated in this paper integrates this …
Test-Driven Development (TDD), an agile development approach that enforces the construction of software systems by means of successive micro-iterative testing coding cycles, has been widely claimed to increase external software quality. In view of this, some managers at Paf-a Nordic gaming entertainment company-were interested in knowing how would TDD perform at their premises. Eventually, if TDD outperformed their traditional way of coding (i.e., YW, short for Your Way), it would be possible to switch to TDD considering the empirical evidence achieved at the company level. We conduct an exper…
Integrating the design and creation of fault identification and diagnostic capabilities into Model-Driven Development methodologies is one approach to enhancing the resilience of Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems. We present a Fault Diagnostic Engine designed to recognise and diagnose faults in IEC 61499 Function Block Applications. Using diagnostic agents that interact directly with the target application, we demonstrate fault monitoring and analysis techniques and as well as failure scenario intervention. By designing and building fault diagnostic resources during early phases of Model-Drive…
We have come to rely on industrial-scale cyber-physical systems more and more to manage tasks and machinery in safety-critical situations. Efficient, reliable fault identification and management has become a critical factor in the design of these increasingly sophisticated and complex devices. Teams of co-operating software agents are one way to coordinate the flow of diagnostic information gathered during fault-finding. By wielding domain knowledge of the software architecture used to construct the system, agents build and refine their beliefs about the location and root cause of faults. This…
IoT is considered as one of the key enabling technologies for the fourth industrial revolution, that is known as Industry 4.0. In this paper, we consider the mechatronic component as the lowest level in the system composition hierarchy that tightly integrates mechanics with the electronics and software required to convert the mechanics to intelligent (smart) object offering well defined services to its environment. For this mechatronic component to be integrated in the IoT-based industrial automation environment, a software layer is required on top of it to convert its conventional interface t…
Industrial cyber-physical systems require complex distributed software to orchestrate many heterogeneous mechatronic components and control multiple physical processes. Industrial automation software is typically developed in a model-driven fashion where abstractions of physical processes called plant models are co-developed and iteratively refined along with the control code. Testing such multi-dimensional systems is extremely difficult because often models might not be accurate, do not correspond accurately with subsequent refinements, and the software must eventually be tested on the real p…
Context: As Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS) become more connected and widely-distributed, often operating in safety-critical environments, we require innovative approaches to detect and diagnose the faults that occur in them. Objective: We profile fault identification and diagnosis techniques employed in the aerospace, automotive, and industrial control domains. By examining both theoretical presentations as well as case studies from production environments, we present a profile of the current approaches being employed and identify gaps. Methodology: A scoping study was used to identi…
The Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is considered to be the next generation of intelligent industrial automation systems that integrate computing, communication and control technologies. In CPS, the interoperability requirements between devices and processes are growing rapidly. However, the diversity and heterogeneity of technologies and standards between information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) in industrial systems pose significant challenges. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides a software design pattern in which software components are connected only through messagi…
Recent advances in ICT enable the evolution of the manufacturing industry to meet the new requirements of the society. Cyber-physical systems, Internet-of-Things (IoT), and Cloud computing, play a key role in the fourth industrial revolution known as Industry 4.0. The microservice architecture has evolved as an alternative to SOA and promises to address many of the challenges in software development. In this paper, we adopt the concept of microservice and describe a framework for manufacturing systems that has the cyber-physical microservice as the key construct. The manufacturing plant proces…
Teaching industry staff on cybersecurity issues is a fundamental activity that must be undertaken in order to guarantee the delivery of successful and robust products to market. Much research attention has been devoted to this topic over the last years. However, the research which has been done has not focused on developing secure code in industrial environments. In this paper we take a look at the constraints and requirements for delivering a training, by means of cybersecurity challenges, that covers secure coding topics from an industry perspective. Using requirements engineering, we aim at…
Autonomous vehicles are slowly becoming reality thanks to the efforts of many academic and industrial organizations. Due to the complexity of the software powering these systems and the dynamicity of the development processes, an architectural solution capable of supporting long-term evolution and maintenance is required. Continuous Experimentation (CE) is an already increasingly adopted practice in software-intensive web-based software systems to steadily improve them over time. CE allows organizations to steer the development efforts by basing decisions on data collected about the system in …
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) employed for Industrial Automation often require the adoption of a hybrid data processing approach mediating between cloud, edge, and fog computing paradigms. Nowadays, it is possible to shift data pre-processing capabilities closer to data sensing to collect environmental measurements locally on the edge or deep edge. In line with the emerging computing paradigms, this work proposes a solution that includes both software and hardware components and which simplifies the deployment of smart measurement systems. The solution stresses also the adoption of standards a…
As the automotive industry focuses its attention more and more towards the software functionality of vehicles, techniques to deliver new software value at a fast pace are needed. Continuous Experimentation, a practice coming from the web-based systems world, is one of such techniques. It enables researchers and developers to use real-world data to verify their hypothesis and steer the software evolution based on performances and user preferences, reducing the reliance on simulations and guesswork. Several challenges prevent the verbatim adoption of this practice on automotive cyber-physical sy…
The software powering today's vehicles surpasses mechatronics as the dominating engineering challenge due to its fast evolving and innovative nature. In addition, the software and system architecture for upcoming vehicles with automated driving functionality is already processing ~750MB/s - corresponding to over 180 simultaneous 4K-video streams from popular video-on-demand services. Hence, self-driving cars will run so much software to resemble "small data centers on wheels" rather than just transportation vehicles. Continuous Integration, Deployment, and Experimentation have been successfull…
Businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, aiming to start up in Model-Based Design (MBD) face difficult choices from a wide range of methods, notations and tools before making the significant investments in planning, procurement and training necessary to deploy new approaches successfully. In the development of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) this is exacerbated by the diversity of formalisms covering computation, physical and human processes. In this paper, we propose the use of a cloud-enabled and open collaboration platform that allows businesses to offer models, tools and …
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) can be found everywhere: smart homes, autonomous vehicles, aircrafts, healthcare, agriculture and industrial production lines. CPSs are often critical, as system failure can cause serious damage to property and human lives. Today's cyber-physical systems are extremely complex, heterogeneous systems: to be able to manage their complexity in a unified way, we need an infrastructure that ensures that our systems operate with the high reliability as intended. In addition to the infrastructure, we need to provide engineers a method to ensure system reliability at design…
Risk is the best known and perhaps the best studied example within a much broader class of cyber security metrics. However, risk is not the only possible cyber security metric. Other metrics such as resilience can exist and could be potentially very valuable to defenders of ICS systems. Often, metrics are defined as measurable properties of a system that quantify the degree to which objectives of the system are achieved. Metrics can provide cyber defenders of an ICS with critical insights regarding the system. Metrics are generally acquired by analyzing relevant attributes of that system. In t…
