Towards Consistency Management in Variability-Intensive Cyber-Physical Production Systems

Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPSs) integrate physical and software elements to enable the flexible and adaptive manufacturing demanded by today's globalized markets.Experts from various engineering disciplines (e.g., electrical, mechatronic, or control software) collaborate to develop these systems.In practice, heterogeneous engineering artifacts (e.g., Bills of Material (BOM), Computer-Aided Design (CAD) drawings, or modeling languages) with diverse semantics are used to design and develop these variability-intensive systems.Managing consistency among these artifacts is crucial to prevent failures during commissioning and reduce engineering costs.However, this is challenging due to interdependencies between artifacts-changes in one artifact affect others, and constraints may evolve, leaving no guarantee of a consistent state.This paper presents our vision for managing consistency in CPPSs by transforming metamodel-conformant artifacts into a unified logical intermediate representation, which can be analyzed using a logical solver.We also propose a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for expressing consistency rules.Our approach is demonstrated using an existing CPPS variability management method, and we outline a research agenda for future work.