A Decentralized Compositional Framework for Dependable Decision Process in Self-Managed Cyber Physical Systems

• Main Authors: Peng Zhou, Decheng Zuo, Kun-Mean Hou, Zhan Zhang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2017-11-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: cyber physical system; dependability; flexibility; self-management; scalability; relative time model; composability and compositionality; decentralized decision process
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/17/11/2580

Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs) need to interact with the changeable environment under various interferences. To provide continuous and high quality services, a self-managed CPS should automatically reconstruct itself to adapt to these changes and recover from failures. Such dynamic adaptation behavior introduces systemic challenges for CPS design, advice evaluation and decision process arrangement. In this paper, a formal compositional framework is proposed to systematically improve the dependability of the decision process. To guarantee the consistent observation of event orders for causal reasoning, this work first proposes a relative time-based method to improve the composability and compositionality of the timing property of events. Based on the relative time solution, a formal reference framework is introduced for self-managed CPSs, which includes a compositional FSM-based actor model (subsystems of CPS), actor-based advice and runtime decomposable decisions. To simplify self-management, a self-similar recursive actor interface is proposed for decision (actor) composition. We provide constraints and seven patterns for the composition of reliability and process time requirements. Further, two decentralized decision process strategies are proposed based on our framework, and we compare the reliability with the static strategy and the centralized processing strategy. The simulation results show that the one-order feedback strategy has high reliability, scalability and stability against the complexity of decision and random failure. This paper also shows a way to simplify the evaluation for dynamic system by improving the composability and compositionality of the subsystem.