Automated Synthesis of Cyber-Physical Systems from Joint Controller/Architecture Specifications

One emerging research direction to address the design of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is the co-design of the architecture and the controllers. The co-design techniques integrate the design of control and architecture in an early phase and the parameters on both sides can be synthesized according to certain design objectives. This explores the characteristics on both sides to achieve more efficient design of such systems. In this paper, we give an overview of the automated synthesis of CPS from joint controller/architecture specifications by explaining the background and motivation for such methods and illustrating this design paradigm with a concrete example of a FlexRay-based embedded control system. Furthermore, we provide the future outlook in this direction by explaining possible extensions and the related challenges.