Engineering Swarms of Cyber-Physical Systems with the CPSwarm Workbench

TL;DR

The paper introduces the CPSwarm workbench, an automated workflow tool that simplifies designing, simulating, and deploying cyber-physical system swarms, demonstrated through a UAV/UGV search and rescue case study.

Contribution

It presents a formalized, integrated workbench that streamlines the entire CPS swarm engineering process from modeling to deployment.

Findings

Swarm performance scales with size.

The workbench effectively supports simulation and hardware deployment.

Deployment process is simplified despite some manual steps.

Abstract

Engineering swarms of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) is a complex process. We present the CPSwarm workbench that creates an automated design workflow to ease this process. This formalized workflow guides the user from modeling, to code generation, to deployment, both in simulation and on CPS hardware platforms. The workbench combines existing and emerging tools to solve real-world CPS swarm problems. As a proof-of-concept, we use the workbench to design a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) for a search and rescue (SAR) use case. We evaluate the resulting swarm behaviors on three levels. First, abstract simulations for rapid prototyping. Second, detailed simulation to test the correctness of the results. Third, deployment on hardware to demonstrate the applicability. We measure the swarm performance in terms of area covered and victims rescued. The results show that the performance of the swarm is proportional to its size. Despite some manual steps, the proposed workbench shows to be well suited to ease the complicated task of deploying a swarm of CPSs.