Towards Formalizing and Relating Different Notions of Consistency in Cyber-Physical Systems Engineering

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are highly complex systems integrating computational and physical processes and consist of many interdependent and composed parts. Engineers from different domains, e.g., mechanical, electrical, and software engineering, cooperate to develop and deploy new CPSs. Engineers often only work on task-specific artifacts and models to reduce the complexity of the overall CPS. These models and artifacts form different views on the CPS, which must be kept consistent to enable development and system analysis. However, this inter-view consistency management lacks tool support and remains a tedious manual task. Hence, this results in late integration risks and may even lead to failed products during deployment. To manage consistency between models, artifacts, and views sufficiently, we need an understanding of the available notions of consistency and their properties. We need to identify, classify, formalize, and relate notions of consistency from different domains to derive a common definition for a consistency-aware, view-based development process for CPSs. This vision paper presents a set of existing notions of consistency we can build on and outline our vision towards consistency-aware CPS engineering.