Towards self-reconfiguration of real-time communication within Cyber-Physical Systems

Today, in domains like automation and robotics systems consist of various sensors and computation nodes. Due to the temporal dependency in quality of measured data, such Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) commonly have real-time requirements on communication. In addition, these systems shall become more flexible and scalable, e.g., by adding new components to the CPS. This would be most suitable if a CPS could react to the presence of a new component and reconfigure itself to run afterwards with the new component integrated to the CPS. This capability is covered by the term Plug-and-Produce. In this paper, we propose a concept to enable Plug-and-Produce within a CPS whose network uses different communication media, e.g., Ethernet and CAN. In this context, we also introduce our three layered software architecture that supports the proposed concept for self-reconfiguration. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.