A Systematic Mapping Study on the Verification of Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical system (CPS) is a kind of complex real-time hybrid system which involves deep interactions between computation processors, communication network, and physical environments are deemed as the key enablers of next generation computer applications. However, how to verify CPS effectively is always a great challenge. Based on current scientific works about CPS verification, this paper aims at identifying the gap of current studies and suggesting promising areas for the future works. For this purpose, we conduct a systematic mapping study over the topic on verification of cyber-physical system. We carry out a widely search of publications from 2006 to 2018 in 11 electronic databases. After the step of study selection, 80 papers are selected as primary studies for answering proposed research questions, focused questions, and statistical questions. According to these questions and their answers, this paper not only presents a quantitative and comprehensive analysis of verification challenges, abstraction methods, verification techniques, assistance tools, and verification scenarios that represent each step of verification works, but also summarizes CPS systematic natures, main routine of verification and future research directions. We believe that this survey can identify gaps in current research works and reveal new insights for the future works.