Multi-view Approach for Modeling Aerospace Cyber-physical Systems

Cyber physical systems contain three parts: physical parts, communication parts and computation parts. Such systems use computations and communication deeply embedded in and interacting with physical processes to add new capabilities to physical systems. Existing architecture description language cannot be well suited for the design of cyber physical systems. In this paper, we propose a multi-view modeling and design method of aerospace cyber-physical system. We divide cyber physical system into three dimensions: physical world dimension, communication dimension and computation dimension. We use different views to develop and evaluate design alternatives within the context of formalisms relevant to selected aspects of the system. Each view highlights certain features and occludes others to make analysis tractable and to focus on particular attributes of aerospace cyber physical systems. The physical world analysis is considered to be one fundamental stage of our proposed method. The proposed method is illustrated by the modeling of the lunar rover system, which involves a broad range of mechanical, electronic, control, communications, computing, mechanics, and physics. In this paper, we specify and model the lunar rover system by extending Modelica and AADL.