On the Use of Component-Based Principles and Practices for Architecting Cyber-Physical Systems

By focussing on Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), this paper investigates how component-based principles and practices are used and support the activity of architecting CPS. For doing so, by running a systematic process, we selected 49 primary studies from the most important publishers search engines. Those papers have been analyzed and their contents classified according to the Classification Framework for Component Models proposed in our previous work. The results show that the main concerns handled by CPS component models are those of integration, performance, and maintainability. The instruments to satisfy those concerns, while architecting CPS, are ad-hoc software/system architecture, model-based approaches, architectural and component languages, and design. The IEC 61499 standard with its functions block is remarkably used to drive the work on six papers. Java is the most frequently used programming language used for implementing the components. Components are deployed mostly at compile time. Interfaces are almost equally distributed into port-based and operation-based. Overall, the results show a transition of technologies and approaches used in Embedded Systems to CPS, but still lacking methods for integrated architecting, in particular in incremental development.