INtegrated TOol chain for model-based design of CPSs

Project Information

INTO-CPS

Grant agreement ID: 644047

DOI 10.3030/644047

Closed project

EC signature date 4 December 2014

Start date 1 January 2015

End date 31 December 2017

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost € 7 956 805,25

EU contribution € 7 956 804,25

Coordinated by

AARHUS UNIVERSITET
Denmark

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - INTO-CPS (INtegrated TOol chain for model-based design of CPSs)

Reporting period: 2017-01-01 to 2017-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Compared to existing technologies commonly used today in industry, INTO-CPS provides an open tool chain that enables the following:

1. Providing a faster route to market for CPS products where control aspects depend upon the development of physical elements (e.g. mechanical parts) that typically take a long time to be developed.
2. Avoiding vendor lock-in by having an open tool chain that can be extended and used in different ways. Although it is well-founded it is based on pragmatic principles where a trade-off between accuracy and speed of analysis is enabled.
3. Including capabilities for exploring large design spaces efficiently so that “optimal” solutions can be found given the parameters that are important for the user both at the cyber and the physical side.
4. Limiting the necessity for large amounts of expensive physical tests in order to provide the necessary evidence for the dependability of the CPS.
5. Enabling traceability of all project artefacts produced by different tools using an open traceability standard.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project’s five objectives are to:
1. Build an open, well-founded tool chain for multidisciplinary model-based design of CPS that covers the full development life cycle of CPS. The tool chain will support multiple modelling paradigms and will cover multiple development activities including requirements modelling, analysis, simulation, validation, verification and traceability of artefacts throughout all development activities across disciplinary boundaries.
2. Provide a sound semantic basis for the tool chain. We will produce mathematical foundations to support CPS co-modelling and to underpin the tool chain. This will include semantics for FMI co-simulation as well as SysML, discrete-event and continuous-time paradigms.
3. Provide practical methods in the form of guidelines and patterns that support the tool chain. The INTO-CPS methodology will be developed to ensure that adoption of the tool chain is cost-effective, providing industrial users with pragmatic guidance to help them determine the best modelling technologies and patterns to meet their needs.
4. Demonstrate, in an industrial setting, the effectiveness of the methods and tools in a variety of application domains. Four complementary industry case studies have been selected from four distinct domains that currently experience pressure to develop reliable CPSs (automotive, agricultural, railways and building automation).
5. Form an INTO-CPS Association to ensure that project results extend beyond the life of the project. Membership of the Association will allow future case study owners access to information, training and competitively priced licenses at various levels of support. Tool vendors will be offered services to help integrate their products into the tool chain.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

3 Impact
The different impact areas are measured by different Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). An overview of these KPIs and their targets for Year 3 is in Table 1.

3.1 Delivering Innovation to Markets
The entire INTO-CPS tool chain can be considered as an innovation that is targeted the industrial market. Initial usage of elements of the tool chain has started for stakeholders outside the project consortium in Year 2. In addition, some of the industrial case studies have come up with new innovations that also will be launched to the commercial market. More information about this is reported in the dissemination and exploitation report for Year 2 and in Table 7 below.

3.2 Delivering Impacts of the Work Programme
Below the four areas where impact is expected are presented with a status on the progress that has been made for each of them.

3.2.1 Reduction in CPS Development Time and Significant Reduction in Maintenance Costs
The INTO-CPS technology gives us hope that reductions can be achieved both in the development time as well as for the maintenance costs. In the Year 2 assessment WP1 estimated a reduction of 10 percent on average in development time which is exactly our target.

3.2.2 Stronger Pan-European Collaboration across Value Chains
INTO-CPS promotes collaboration between different disciplines and between organisations in value chains. At the technical level, the collaboration focus between WP2 to 5 on the theoretical limitations of abstracting to something that can be efficiently supported by model checking is intended to lower the entry barrier for the Model Based Development approach for CPSs. In particular, the tool chain focus with full traceability between different artefacts is important to enable support for collaboration between different companies in each value chain.

3.2.3 Development of a Competitive Offer in Europe
One of the major challenges facing the development of competitive European platforms for ICT is the lack of semantic integration between design tools at the application level. The foundations underlying the INTO-CPS approach ensure that the technology is prepared for the next generation of core ICT platforms. At the technical level, the open INTO-CPS tool chain is based around a plug-in architecture, and thus INTO-CPS enables organisations to incorporate their preferred tools while integrating co-modelling approaches. The openness of the platform allows new analysis tools to be integrated in the future and this will enable organisations to connect to a next generation ICT low-level platform.

3.2.4 Lifting Europe’s Innovation Capacity and Competitiveness
CPS technology facilitates innovations in many sectors, but the ability to exploit this opportunity is hindered by the difficulty of evaluating product ideas, especially with respect to global properties such as safety and dependability, without making a major investment in the development of physical prototypes. During Year 2 we have been able to demonstrate this using the INTO-CPS technology on the industrial case studies. In addition, each of the four industrial case studies have innovation potential and this will be disseminated to the world with initial focus on the members of the IFG. All innovation potentials identified so far are listed in Table 7 below. A

3.3 Impact on SMEs
The INTO-CPS consortium includes five SMEs and, naturally, the work conducted has impact on each of them and their future possibilities. In addition, the IFG contains a lot of other SMEs who all are interested in the research results produced by the project. In particular for SMEs it is important that any investment in new technologies are feasible, and here we feel that having based the development of the INTO-CPS Application on Electron using web-technologies will make it easier for SMEs to invest in such a technology in case it could be delivered as a service in a cloud context.

Table 1_ Status of the KPIs after Year 3

Figure 4: Interaction between the WPs

Figure 2: Overview of the INTO-CPS tool chain

Figure 3: Tracing requirements to the SysML architecture (left) and simulation results to requiremen

Figure 1: Connections in the INTO-CPS tool chain