Augmenting Software Architectures with Physical Components

This paper presents an extension of existing software architecture tools to model physical systems, their interconnections, and the interactions between physical and cyber components. We introduce a new cyber-physical system (CPS) architectural style to support the construction of architectural descriptions of complete systems and to serve as the reference context for analysis and evaluation of design alternatives using existing model-based tools. The implementation of the CPS architectural style in AcmeStudio includes behavioral annotations on components and connectors using either finite state processes (FSP) or linear hybrid automata (LHA) with plug-ins to perform behavior analysis. The application of the CPS architectural style is illustrated for the STARMAC quadrotor.