Dependability analysis of a cyber‐physical system for smart environments. (28th August 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Andrade, Ermeson; Nogueira, Bruno; Callou, Gustavo; Alves, Gabriel
• Is Part Of: Concurrency and computation. Volume 31:Number 1(2019)
• Page Start: n/a
• Page End: n/a
• Publication Date: 2018-08-28
• Subjects: cyber‐physical systems -- dependability -- SPNs -- water treatment plant; Parallel processing (Electronic computers) -- Periodicals; Parallel computers -- Periodicals; 004.35
• DOI: 10.1002/cpe.4739
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1532-0626

Abstract

Summary: Cyber‐Physical Systems (CPSs) represent a new generation of smart systems that orchestrates physical elements with computation. This new class of system is intelligent and connected and is changing the way people deal with engineered systems, just as the Internet transformed the way people interact with information. Although several works have been proposed to support the design and development of CPSs, dependability evaluation of these systems have been investigated little. Dependability assessment (eg, reliability and availability) of cyber‐physical systems is of great importance as, very often, they are deployed in safety or business‐critical contexts. This paper presents a strategy based on Stochastic Petri Nets (SPNs) for dependability modeling, evaluation, and tuning of smart CPSs. The tuning is carried out through sensitivity analysis on the SPN models to efficiently identify the system components that most impact on the system's overall availability. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated by evaluating a smart CPS deployed in a water treatment plant. Experimental results revealed that the proposed strategy helps highlight which components require attention when attempting to achieve high availability, and by adding redundancy to these components, the downtime of adopted CPS was reduced drastically from half a day to only 8 minutes.