Fostering Concurrent Engineering of Cyber-physical Systems A Proposal for an Ontological Context Framework

Cyber-physical systems are not developed as standalone systems, but in conjunction with other systems and are subsequently aggregated to some super system (i.e. a car or an airplane). Hence, cyber-physical systems share parts of their context with one another and depend on their mutual functionality. Moreover, in industrial practice, these systems are typically developed concurrently by different development teams, either within one original equipment manufacturer or by different suppliers. For these reasons, it is a challenging task to keep the different contexts of multiple cyber-physical systems consistent with one other and consistent with the super system's specifications. To aid the concurrent development of multiple cyber-physical systems, this paper suggests an ontology-centric approach to define and analyze the systems' respective contexts. The ontological context framework provides a foundation for automated consistency checking and model creation.