A Model-driven Approach to Develop and Manage Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) integrate computing, networking, and physical processes to digitally execute tasks on or using the physical elements of a system. Power microgrids are a particular kind of CPS that enables management and autonomic control of local smart grids, aiming at reliability, fault tolerance and energy efficiency, among other goals. This paper explores a new approach based on MDE that uses models at runtime techniques to manage and control microgrids. The approach employs a model execution engine that manages a causally connected runtime model of the microgrid and interprets user-defined models in order to generate controls for the microgrid elements. We demonstrate the approach by building the lower layer of the model execution engine. Furthermore, we explore a model-driven technique to build the execution engine and use the resulting experience to argue that the approach can be extended to other kinds of cyber-physical systems.