Cross-Domain Traceability and Consistency Management in DevOps for Cyber-Physical Systems
摘要
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are developed in a collaborative manner by software engineers, engineers, mechanical engineers, physicists, and other specialists. However, a challenge when multiple engineers work concurrently is to keep artifacts synchronized and consistent, mainly in the context of constant and iterative cycles of DevOPS. This is even harder when the engineering process relies on a myriad of tools and domains (e.g., mechanic, electronic, and software). Previous approaches have addressed this challenge from various perspectives, such as establishing trace links between artifacts or computing change propagation paths. However, these methods primarily offer supplementary information to engineers, still requiring manual work for propagating changes. Moreover, existing tools often fall short in supporting traceability across domains and lack the efficiency and granularity required for developing software-intensive systems. This chapter introduces our solution, reactive links, which are fine-grained trace links that enable automatic change propagation between property values across artifacts from different domains, even when managed in separate tools. Unlike traditional passive links, reactive links actively synchronize artifacts in response to model modifications, ensuring consistency and alignment across engineering tools. The core contribution reactive links to improve the engineering of CPS in DevOPS by reducing the manual effort needed to maintain model synchronization and by minimizing inconsistencies that often arise in collaborative, multi-tool environments.