Simulation-as-a-Service: a simulation platform for cyber-physical systems

With the increasing demand for embedded intelligence in many diverse areas of application, manufacturers are working on designing and developing Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) that meet the rapidly growing demand of the market. CPS require tight integration between virtual and physical artifacts. Architectural evaluation is one way to overcome the complexity of this integration, yet it is a challenging task. One possible approach to help systems engineers and software architects evaluate their design before implementing it is simulation. Simulation can reduce expensive prototypes by testing the system under certain conditions that would be too risky and too costly to consider in a prototype. Nevertheless, existing commercial and academic simulation platforms are often domain-specilic, require a certain amount of manual effort, and do not support straightforward coupling of different software components. This paper presents a SaaS-based (Software-as-a-Service) simulation platform that aims to solve these challenges. It enables easy abstraction of software components, composition of complex architectural scenarios, and the evaluation of architecture design by means of simulation. The proposed platform is a web-based, graphical architectural simulation infrastructure. In this paper, we present the platform along with a simulation example based on a security aspect of a vehicle system to illustrate the platform's capabilities.