A SysML-based Function-Centered Approach for the Modeling of System Groups for Collaborative Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are able to collaborate with other CPSs in their environment. Such collaboration, which contains a suitable combination and aggregation of the individual functions of different CPSs, makes it possible that goals can be jointly achieved that the individual CPS would not have been able to achieve on its own. As part of the collaboration, the collaborative CPSs, which may come from different manufacturers, form temporary system groups in which they assume different roles and associated responsibilities. This paper presents a domain-independent function-centered approach that enables the modeling of such system groups at the design time of the single collaborative CPS and thus serves as a basis for cross-manufacturer collaboration planning. The approach describes in 6 steps how the constitution and the behavior of the system group with its participants can be modeled with the help of functions and independent of specific components. The modeling is based on the Systems Modeling Language (SysML), which has been extended to be able to express aspects of the system group.