Ontological reasoning in the design space exploration of advanced cyber–physical systems

Abstract Cyber–physical systems are becoming increasingly complex. In these advanced systems, the different engineering domains involved in the design process become more and more intertwined. Therefore, a traditional (sequential) design process becomes inefficient in finding good design options. Instead, an integrated approach is needed where parameters in multiple different engineering domains can be chosen, evaluated, and optimized to achieve a good overall solution. However, in such an approach, the combined design space becomes vast. As such, methods are needed to mitigate this problem. In this paper, we show a method for systematically capturing and updating domain knowledge in the context of a co-design process involving different engineering domains, i.e. control and embedded. We rely on ontologies to reason about the relationships between parameters in the different domains. This allows us to derive a stepwise design space exploration workflow where this domain knowledge is used to quickly reduce the design space to a subset of likely good candidates. We illustrate our approach by applying it to the design space exploration process for an advanced electric motor control system and its deployment on embedded hardware.