Communication Patterns for Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) represent a new paradigm of future intelligent systems. They consist of loosely coupled subsystems which interact with mechanisms of Service oriented Architecture (SoA). In this paper we try to open a new topic in industrial communications. This topic is focused on basic communication patterns within CPSs. Patterns are abstract and generic solutions for common problems in the design of systems. They have a defined feature set, their flaws are known, and they help to avoid repeating errors. Furthermore, patterns introduce a common vocabulary within a community, which simplifies communication between people and documentation. Patterns often represent best practices that are used in already existing protocols. Therefore this work starts to evaluate different existing communication protocols in the scope of SoA and loosely coupled systems, extracts common tasks and implementations, and identifies common communication patterns.