UIO-Based Testbed Augmentation for Simulating Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are rapidly expanding into our daily lives. The development process for such systems is challenging due to the need of creating and testing numerous and heterogeneous devices in differing environments. Simulation systems can aid the development but many open challenges remain. First, creating devices is cumbersome due to the lack of proper supporting tools. Second, testing is scenario specific and mostly small scale. Third, its difficult to integrate physical devices and small systems in order to increase scale and verifiability. We propose a system that addresses these issues, and demonstrate its benefits in augmenting our intelligent transportation system testbed. For this, we present ubiquitous interactive objects (UIOs) as a uniform model for smart devices, and support dynamic adding to, deleting from, and updating of the simulation. The case study shows that our UIO model and simulation system ease the development of CPSs, while facilitating better applications through dependable results.