An agent-oriented approach for cyber-physical system with dependability features

Cyber-physical systems integrate physical and cyber components for high performance, self-maintenance, self-organization, self-assembly, while the process must be dependable, safety, securely, efficiently and in real-time. The research challenges of cyber-physical system are concerning: abstractions and architecture; distributed computation and networked control; verification and validation. This paper aims to meet the development of the cyber-physical systems, especially the ones referring to dependability, by the development of a method for system behaviour evaluation with two aspects: qualitative and quantitative. The quantitative evaluation is made using a multi-agent model that supports an event-driven architecture. The most appropriate methodology - INGENIAS approach - for event-driven multi-agent model development, is selected based on more evaluation criteria. The paper presents the analysis-to-design procedure of the model consisting in the description of the following meta-models: organization, environment, agent, tasks/goals, and interaction.