Simplifying CPS Application Development through Fine-grained, Automatic Timeout Predictions

Application development for Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) is challenging, because the wireless network and the devices introduce latencies that vary continuously along with the load, status, or environmental conditions of the infrastructure. Reactive programming is well suited for the development of event-driven applications, yet current reactive programming frameworks require developers to predict event arrival time-boundaries at compile time, which is impractical, if not impossible, for CPS. Thus, there is a tradeoff between timeliness and completeness of complex event computations, e.g., operational efficiency in a manufacturing plant: Waiting too long until all individual events arrive can fail to produce a useful result, while not waiting long enough may lead to faults due to incomplete status information. In this article, we propose (a) a set of extensions to state-of-the-art reactive programming frameworks, which remove the burden of specifying timeouts at compile time by utilizing (b) Khronos, a middleware that automatically determines timeouts by taking into account variations in event arrival times due to the underlying infrastructure. Evaluation on a physical testbed shows that the extensions significantly decrease developer effort and that Khronos considerably improves timeliness under varying network configurations and conditions, while still satisfying the application’s tolerance to missed events.

Publication year:2020

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