Orthogonal Uncertainty Modeling in the Engineering of Cyber-Physical Systems

Software-intensive cyber-physical systems (CPS) perform essential tasks such as controlling automated production processes in industrial production plants. The required levels of autonomy, openness, and self-adaptation, as well as the dynamic nature of the context of such CPS, result in challenging tasks for their engineering. During operation, unexpected situations in which the system has insufficient knowledge about the current state of the system itself as well as its context may occur. Engineering CPS, e.g., for industrial production sites, must account for such uncertainties the system will have to cope with during its lifetime in a structured and systematic way. Since the development of CPS requires consideration of different system perspectives, current uncertainty modeling approaches cannot be applied right away, as they do not explicitly consider uncertainty aspects that affect different artifacts. To aid the engineering of CPS, this article presents a model-based approach to document uncertainty. We propose “Orthogonal Uncertainty Models,” which closely integrate with other engineering artifacts from different perspectives, as a means for capturing a dedicated uncertainty viewpoint. Our approach has been evaluated in the industry automation domain. The application shows that the idea of regarding uncertainty within a dedicated perspective is highly beneficial. Particularly, our approach helps to uncover and document uncertainties related to behavioral, functional, and structural properties of a system, as well as uncertainties related to business models that would otherwise possibly remain covert. Note to Practitioners —Identifying and documenting uncertainties, which may occur during operation of a system, is a common problem in engineering processes. Such uncertainties may lead to severe damage, and thus need to be mitigated appropriately. It is crucial to account for these uncertainties during engineering, especially in the early phases. Depending on the specific project characteristics, a multitude of different diagram types are used to model a system. Uncertainties thus reflect in many artifacts, which leads to: 1) redundancies in the specified uncertainty attached to diagram elements and 2) uncertainty information (e.g., about the cause or effect of uncertainty) that is spread across different diagrams. The latter makes it difficult to structure uncertainty information and trace it throughout the engineering process so that uncertainty can be systematically considered. Our approach provides a graphical modeling language that employs a dedicated perspective on uncertainty in separate diagrams that can be linked to any engineering artifact.