Managing Variability of Cyber-Physical Production Systems: Towards Consistency Management

Engineering Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPSs) involves several different disciplines, where team members range from mechanical, electrical, and automation engineers, to control software engineers. When developing variability-intensive software systems such as CPPSs, engineers create heterogeneous engineering artifacts of varying granularity, structure, and level of abstraction in the problem and solution space, e.g., CAD drawings, delta models, and control software artifacts. Managing consistency among these heterogeneous artifacts is essential during the development and maintenance of these systems to reduce development costs and runtime failures. Software product line engineering provides approaches to manage the variability of heterogeneous artifacts. However, these approaches must be adapted and extended to manage consistency in CPPSs and address the additional multidimensional challenges in CPPSs. In this short paper, we outline these challenges, motivate them using a case study, and discuss potential solutions to manage the consistency of engineering artifacts expressing CPPS control software variability. We thereby lay the grounds for a deeper understanding of possible inconsistencies and exploring new methods for managing consistency in control software variability in CPPSs.