Towards an analysis-driven rapid design process for cyber-physical systems

System design typically involves the specification of requirements and evaluation of the design with respect to those requirements. The requirements describe and quantify the desired physical and software properties of the system. Evaluating requirements often involves performing domain-specific analysis. Domain-specific analyses are spread across a wide range of domains and tools, e.g., geometric properties vs. dynamics behavior of the system. Different analysis types require different tools, where each tool targets a narrow range of domains or a single domain. For large system designs, the requirements could be too complex to be evaluated by a single analysis tool. In such cases, the coupling of multiple domains and analysis tools is inevitable, and managing these interactions can prove to be difficult, often leading to wasted efforts. In this paper we present an analysis-driven rapid design process for Cyber-Physical Systems that spans multiple domain models and various analysis tools from a wide range of domains, and helps to reduce the design time through the following: (1) revealing and tracking instances of cross-domain coupling, thereby reducing design time; (2) disqualifying non-viable design configurations; and (3) using analysis templates for continuous design evolution with respect to the requirements; minor adjustments to requirements can be done seamlessly, without a complete redesign of the existing reusable analysis templates. Furthermore, we present a case study for an automotive driveline design to demonstrate an implementation of this process.