CHARIOT: a domain specific language for extensible cyber-physical systems

Abstract

Wider adoption, availability and ubiquity of wireless networking technologies, integrated sensors, actuators, and edge computing devices is facilitating a paradigm shift by allowing us to transition from traditional statically configured vertical silos of CyberPhysical Systems (CPS) to next generation CPS that are more open, dynamic and extensible. Fractionated spacecraft, smart cities computing architectures, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) clusters, platoon of vehicles on highways are all examples of extensible CPS wherein extensibility is implied by the dynamic aggregation of physical resources, affect of physical dynamics on availability of computing resources, and various multi-domain applications hosted on these systems. However, realization of extensible CPS requires resolving design-time and run-time challenges emanating from properties specific to these systems. In this paper, we first describe different properties of extensible CPS - dynamism, extensibility, remote deployment, security, heterogeneity and resilience. Then we identify different design-time challenges stemming from heterogeneity and resilience requirements. We particularly focus on software heterogeneity arising from availability of various communication middleware. We then present appropriate solutions in the context of a novel domain specific language, which can be used to design resilient systems while remaining agnostic to middleware heterogeneities. We also describe how this language and its features have evolved from our past work. We use a platform of fractionated spacecraft to describe our solution.

Publication
Proceedings of the Workshop on Domain-Specific Modeling, DSM@SPLASH 2015, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, October 27, 2015