Context variation for service self-contextualization in cyber-physical systems

Abstract

Operation and configuration of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) require approaches for managing the variability at design time and the dynamics at runtime caused by a multitude of component types and changing application environments. As a contribution to this area, this paper proposes to integrate concepts for variability management with approaches for self-organization in intelligent systems. Our approach exploits the idea of self-contextualization to autonomously adapt behaviors of multiple services to the current situation. More concrete, we put the “context” of CPS into the conceptual focus of our approach and propose context variants for use in self-contextualization of CPS. The main contributions of this paper are to identify challenges in variability management of CPS based on an industrial case, the integration of context variants into the reference model for selfcontextualizing services and an initial validation using a case study.