Towards Trustworthy Adaptation of Cyber-Physical Production Systems with Contract-Based Design

Adapting a Cyber-Physical Production System (CPPS) to different production goals and conditions requires capabilities to validate multi-domain dependencies. Traditional approaches to CPPS adaptation rely on domain experts’ implicit knowledge, making reconfiguration prone to error, challenging to validate, and hard to trust. Our research aims at improving the trustworthiness of the CPPS adaptation process regarding effectiveness, risk mitigation, and understandability, with a formal representation of reconfiguration dependencies and conditions. This paper introduces the approach Trustworthy Adaptation Process for CPPS (TAP-CPPS) to validate the feasibility of achieving the adaptation goal by reconfiguration. TAP-CPPS is a systematic approach to (i) model the adaptation process using BPMN; and (ii) validate the adaptation process model using contracts by verifying explicit reconfiguration pre-/post-conditions in the BPMN model, which is linked to the CPPS configuration variants. We initially evaluate TAP-CPPS with a use case of a CPPS for joining car parts, and derive a research agenda.