Virtual Design and Verification of Cyber-physical Systems: Industrial Process Plant Design

This paper discusses a research project to support virtual design and verification of industrial process plant designs. Process plants are a class of cyber-physical systems (CPS), and these research results should generally apply to other types of CPS such as those associated with the Smart Grid. Modeling is an essential part of process plant design and integral in other applications such as manufacturing. Models produced in design have obvious roles in system implementation, deployment and certification. For manufacturing systems, models also have use in downstream activities including system certification, performance optimization, real-time diagnostics and prognostics, and maintenance. The paper discusses the results associated with a prototype that uses domain-specific models of different views of a system design that improves collaboration through integrated models and aligned semantics and provides examples of how the integration with formal methods can identify defects in designs, and automatically generate test vectors with requirement-to-test traceability