MOTIVATION
Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) – from robotics to transportation to medical devices – will play a crucial role in the quality of life of European citizens and the future of the European economy. One specific example is the public transport system where the percentage of fully automated operation is expected to increase from today’s 30% to 70% by 2030: CPS is a key enabler in this and many other industrial and societal evolutions. Increasing automation to such an extent, however, gives rise to many challenges, at the crux of which lies the hardware and software symbiosis. Several new challenges arise from the increasing complexity of CPS software, seamless connectivity, abundant compute power, and hardware heterogeneity. Emerging CPS are characterised by an evolving development that never ends, and engineering practitioners in the field are facing fundamental development challenges: observability, testability and predictability of the behaviour of emerging CPS is highly limited and, unfortunately, their usage in the real world can lead to accidents, sometimes tragically also involving humans. DevOps practices and tools are potentially the right solution to this problem, but they have not been developed to be applied in CPS domains. COSMOS takes on these challenges by delivering the technological and methodological advances necessary to enable DevOps for development of complex, trustworthy and reliable CPS solutions.
CHALLENGE
A key challenge in applying DevOps practices to CPS domains is that it requires specific development and verification strategies able to include Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) capabilities. Also, embedded systems design, manufacturing, and testing have different, longer lead times and cycle times than enterprise software, leading to longer V&V procedures and higher testing costs (typically over 25% of total development costs). Therefore, CPS are far more difficult to integrate, and testing the hardware is not always practically possible: the final version of the hardware is often available late and testing on the hardware directly can be expensive. A typical approach to dealing with this is to develop hardware proxies, such as prior system hardware versions/simulators and digital twins. However, this approach is flawed and is not sufficient to operate a V&V process that provides high levels of verifiability, trustworthiness, and confidence in the CPS behaviours.
OBJECTIVES
COSMOS overcomes the challenges of developing and evolving high-quality, dependable CPS by employing two key technologies: DevOps and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The collaborative project has:
a) Designed, developed, and validated solutions that continuously improve the overall efficiency/quality of CPS, reducing the number of post-release defects and security vulnerabilities.
b) Developed solutions that enable CPS to autonomously adapt to unexpected run-time behaviours due, for example, to unexpected operating contexts.
c) Investigated the extent to which DevOps concepts can be applied in CPS domains over a diversified set of complex industrial case studies.
