CPS-Agent oriented construction and implementation for cyber physical systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) have attracted many researchers in areas as diverse as aerospace, manufacturing, transportation, and so on. However, modeling methodologies and tools for autonomous objects in CPS are still lacking. In this paper, the CPS-Agent is proposed to model objects with consideration of temporal-spatial traits and interaction with physical environment. It is formulated by a five-tuple. Furthermore, considering that no universal methodology of coordination strategy formulation could be used to guide researchers, we present a role-based strategy formulation to make work patterns of CPS-Agents more clear. In terms of network communication among CPS-Agents, a set of communicative primitives is tailored based on the FIPA-ACL specification. Afterward, to guide engineers in designing systems according to their application requirements in the area of CPS, we design templates and a novel visual support tool for generating C++ files automatically corresponding to customized CPS-Agents, coordination strategies, and coordination groups. Finally, the complete development process based on our methodologies and tool is illustrated by an instance of a car team.