TRILATERAL: A Model-Based Approach for Industrial CPS–Monitoring and Control

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are advanced embedded systems within a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) that require to be monitored and controlled. Such necessities are becoming increasingly common due to the advent of the Industry 4.0 among other smart deployments. A recurring issue in this field is that existing and new projects are reinventing the wheel by starting the development and deployment of IoT devices from scratch. To overcome such loss of efficiency in development, we propose to use Software Product Line (SPL) and Model-Based Engineering (MBE) since they seem promising in the literature in order to accelerate and ease the development software while reducing bugs and errors, and hence, costs. Additionally, a personalized solution is needed since not all Industrial CPSs (ICPSs) are composed by the same devices or use the same IoT communication protocols. Thus, we realized that a Domain Specific Language (DSL) along with a standard, will allow the user to graphically model the ICPS for this to be monitored and controlled. Therefore, this work presents TRILATERAL, a SPL Model Based tool that uses a Domain Specific Language (DSL) to allow users to graphically model ICPSs with a IEC 61850 based metamodel, a standard originally designed for electrical substations but that has also been used in other domains. TRILATERAL automatically generates an artifact in order to create a middleware between the ICPS and the monitoring system to monitor and control all the devices within the ICPS. This tool is designed, implemented and finally, validated with a real use case (catenary-free tram) where different lessons have been learned.