Workflow Description in Cyber-physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are networks of computational and physical processes, often containing human actors. In a CPS-setting, the computational processes collect information on their physical environment via sensors, and react upon via actuators in order to reach a desired state of the physical world. In the approach presented in this paper a CPS application is implemented as a hierarchical workflow of mostly independent tasks, which are executed in a distributed environment, and satisfy timing constraints. In certain cases such workflows can be defined from natural language descriptions with the use of ontologies. The structure of a workflow, as well as the constraints put on the constituting tasks, are expressed in a domainspecific programming language.