Managed evolution of long-living cyber-physical systems

The continued rapid information technological progress is causing major changes. From embedded systems to intelligent embedded systems and cyber-physical systems, the system evolution is always confronted with the challenge of the frequently changing requirements: the proliferation of business models, the rapid development of technology, the fast changing market and customer requirements, new varieties of development methods and models, etc. Cyber-physical systems(CPS) with a long-term life cycle (long-living) play a very important role in many areas, especially in smart factories, digital manufacturing, smart logistics, and energy efficiency. It combines the physical part with the cyber part in a holistic way, where the two parts have to flexibly and dependably adapt to each other to adapt to the changing system environment. On the other hand, a long-living CPS is complicated and multi-configurational, so an incompatible or non-combinable system development can lead to problems or high expenditures. Therefore, an approach is required to reduce the evolution risks and investment needs during the evolution of long-living CPSs. This thesis provides an approach for the managed evolution of long-living CPSs, which is based on the formal descriptions and model transformations of managed evolution of the long-living CPSs. This approach guarantees the consistency between the system evolution requirements and system implementation. Furthermore, with this approach the influence factors for investment needs like the cost of implementation can be scaled to optimize the expenditures of implementation. This approach is evaluated with two practical cases to ascertain the suitability for the managed evolution of long-living CPSs.