A preliminary study on architecting cyber-physical systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are deemed as the key enablers of next generation applications. Needless to say, the design, verification and validation of cyber-physical systems reaches unprecedented levels of complexity, specially due to their sensibility to safety issues. Under this perspective, leveraging architectural descriptions to reason on a CPS seems to be the obvious way to manage its inherent complexity. A body of knowledge on architecting CPSs has been proposed in the past years. Still, the trends of research on architecting CPS is unclear. In order to shade some light on the state-of-The art in architecting CPS, this paper presents a preliminary study on the challenges, goals, and solutions reported so far in architecting CPSs.