Software Abstractions and Human-Cyber-Physical Systems Architecture Modelling

It is over fifty years since the subject discipline of software engineering and more than forty years from when the area of formal methods have been established. During this period, the academic community has accomplished extensive research in foundations and methods of software engineering, as well as developing and teaching a large body of software engineering knowledge and techniques. At the same time, the IT industry has produced larger, more complex, and better (in many aspects) software systems. Yet, these large projects are largely developed using a trial and error approach, without systematic use of the developed software engineering methods and tools. The cost of these projects is high, the percentage of project delay and cancellation is significant, and the dependability of the systems is low in many requirements. The most serious problem of this ad hoc development approach is that the development process is not repeatable and the systems developed are not well evolvable. This problem is particularly crucial for the design and implementation of modern networked distributed software systems, known as Human-Cyber-Physical Systems (HCPS).