Reliability Modeling of Cyber-Physical Systems: A Holistic Overview and Challenges

The goal of this paper is to provide a holistic overview and identify challenges of reliability modeling in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Cyber-physical systems are complex systems that incorporate three paradigms of different natures: hardware, software and humans. Each of the paradigms raises its specific challenges and instills its own types of faults and failures that occur following their specific patterns. Therefore, each of the paradigms requires different reliability modeling approaches, and, moreover, all modeling approaches need to be combined. This combination can enable development of a holistic CPS reliability modeling approach. In this paper, we present the specificities of reliability and fault modeling for all three paradigms that comprise CPS: hardware, software and humans, and discuss the challenges related to their combination for providing a holistic approach to CPS reliability modeling.