Software Engineering for Smart Cyber-Physical Systems: Models, System-Environment Boundary, and Social Aspects

Smart Cyber-Physical Systems (sCPS) are a novel kind of Cyber- Physical Systems engineered to take advantage of large-scale cooperation between devices, users and environment to achieve added value in face of uncertainty and various situations in their environment. Examples of sCPS include modern traffic systems, Industry 4.0 systems, systems for smart-buildings, smart energy grids, etc. The uniting aspect of all these systems is that to achieve their high-level of intelligence, adaptivity and ability to optimize and learn, they heavily rely on software. This makes them software-intensive systems, where software becomes their most complex part. Engineering sCPS thus becomes a recognized software engineering discipline, which however, due to specifics of sCPS, can only partially rely on the existing body of knowledge in software engineering. In fact, it turns out that many of the traditional approaches to architecture modeling and software development fail to cope with the high dynamicity and uncertainty of sCPS. This calls for innovative approaches that jointly reflect and address the specifics of such systems. This paper maps the discussions and results of the Third International Workshop on Software Engineering for Smart Cyber-Physical Systems (SEsCPS 2017), which specifically focuses on challenges and promising solutions in the area of software engineering for sCPS.