Work-In-Progress: Simplifying CPS Development with Real-Time Virtual Resources

The specification, design, prototyping, analysis, implementation, information management, verification, privacy and security guarantees, safety assurance, and maintenance of cyber-physical systems (CPS) are extremely complex, owing to the multitude of operating systems, software components, hardware platforms, communication infrastructures, sensors and activators, human-machine interfaces, and numerous intertwined feedback loops. This paper describes a project to simplify all these life-cycle phases of developing and maintaining CPS by introducing Real-Time Virtual Resources (RTVR). RTVR forms a virtual layer between application software components and physical resources consisting of hardware platforms, communication infrastructures, and sensors and activators so that the software components can be implemented without knowledge of the details of the physical resources and thus can be ported from one physical resource into another with ease. Such open systems make it easy to add and remove software applications and reduce implementation cost when compared to systems which physically assign distinct computing resources to run different applications. However, most existing virtualization schemes [2, 13] significantly under-utilize the underlying physical resources in order to maintain the schedulability of real-time tasks as if they were scheduled on dedicated physical resources. Also, these schemes are not transparent to the software applications in that they need to be aware of each other and modification of the software may be necessary. Our proposed RTVR based on the Regularity-based Resource Partition (RRP) Model [7, 9] overcomes the above shortcomings, making it a true contender in simplifying all phases of CPS development and maintenance. This paper outlines the first of four project tasks to be performed: the specification, design, prototyping, analysis, implementation, verification, and maintenance of CPS with RTVR.