Ontological reasoning for consistency in the design of cyber-physical systems

The design of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) involves a multitude of stakeholders. Each of these stakeholders has a specific view on the system under design. Unfortunately, when designers create artefacts in their different views in a concurrent manner, the integration of the different views may reveal inconsistencies. This leads to time consuming, iterative design processes where inconsistencies are resolved, in turn possibly creating new ones. It is hence necessary to reason explicitly about the view-specific properties that depend on, and influence properties of other views. This enables consistency during integration and reduces the development time and effort. In this paper we formalise the interrelationships between the different views, in the context of different design processes, to allow designers to meaningfully and efficiently manage inconsistencies. Our formalisation introduces ontological domain properties and their relations as the link between the view-specific properties used by the stakeholders. Thus, our approach combines the state of the art of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and Semantic Web. The relevance of this approach is demonstrated by means of a motivating example.

Publication year:2016

Keywords:P1 Proceeding

BOF-keylabel:yes

Authors from:Higher Education

Accessibility:Closed