An Approach to Middleware Specialization for Cyber Physical Systems

Contemporary computing infrastructure, such as networking stacks, OS and middleware, are made up of layers of software functionality that have evolved over decades to support the broadest range of applications. The feature-richness and the layers of functionality, however, tend to be excessive and a source of performance overhead for Cyber-physical Systems (CPS). Yet it is necessary to leverage the decades of proven patterns and principles in these infrastructures. This paper presents an approach to systematically specialize general-purpose middleware used to host CPS. Our approach is based on the principles of Feature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD), which requires deducing an algebraic structure of contemporary middleware based on a higher level of abstraction of features. The paper showcase how Origami matrices and generative programming can play a key role in realizing the specializations. The paper concludes by delving in to future open areas of middleware specialization research.