Towards a Model-Based DevOps for Cyber-Physical Systems

The emerging field of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) calls for new scenarios of the use of models. In particular, CPS require to support both the integration of physical and cyber parts in innovative complex systems or production chains, together with the management of the data gathered from the environment to drive dynamic reconfiguration at runtime or finding improved designs. In such a context, the engineering of CPS must rely on models to uniformly reason about various heterogeneous concerns all along the system life cycle. In the last decades, the use of models has been intensively investigated both at design time for driving the development of complex systems, and at runtime as a reasoning layer to support deployment, monitoring and runtime adaptations. However, the approaches remain mostly independent. With the advent of DevOps principles, the engineering of CPS would benefit from supporting a smooth continuum of models from design to runtime, and vice versa. In this vision paper, we introduce a vision for supporting model-based DevOps practices, and we infer the corresponding research roadmap for the modeling community to address this vision by discussing a CPS demonstrator.