Engineering Cyber-Physical Systems - Mechatronics Wine in New Bottles?

Cyber-Physical system (CPS), one of the nine key technical areas of Industry 4.0, will transform the way we interact with the physical world. After analysing the current definitions, the common challenges and hurdles faced by system designers, we show that CPS is actually a subset of a mechatronic system and suggest a new definition. We also show how system design has been approached differently by experts from different domains and outline practical difficulties in engineering CPS. As existing CPS design approaches attempt synthesis of design models at signal levels only and do not model energy interactions at physical levels, design synthesis and design automation have become difficult problems. Model-driven development holds the key to overcome design synthesis and end-to-end design automation problems.