Assured Cloud Platforms for Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems: The ACICS Approach

With the emergence of “Industry 4.0”, the integration of cloud technologies and industrial cyber-physical systems becomes increasingly important to boost productivity. The industrial cyber-physical systems infrastructures and their fusion with the cloud lead to massive amounts of data acquired for controlling particular processes, but also for supporting decision-making. Although cloud-assisted systems are increasingly important in many domains, and ensuring their dependability is crucial, existing platforms do not provide satisfactory support to meet the dependability demands of industrial applications. The overall goal of the ACICS project is to provide models, methods and tools that facilitate a substantial increase of dependability of cloud-based platforms for industrial cyber-physical applications, with respect to consistency, security and interoperability of data, timing predictability of using shared virtual resources, together with a framework of guaranteeing quality-of-service enforcement by formal analysis and verification. In this paper, we present the main conceptual ideas behind the ACICS approach.