Microservices for Continuous Deployment, Monitoring and Validation in Cyber-Physical Systems: an Industrial Case Study for Elevators Systems

Abstract

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are systems that integrate digital cyber computations with physical processes. The software embedded in CPSs has a long life-cycle, requiring constant evolution to support new requirements, bug fixes, and deal with hardware obsolescence. To date, the development of software for CPSs is fragmented, which makes it extremely expensive. This could be substantially enhanced by tightly connecting the development and operation phases, as is done in other software engineering domains (e.g., web engineering through DevOps). Nevertheless, there are still complex issues that make it difficult to use DevOps techniques in the CPS domain, such as those related to hardware-software co-design. To pave the way towards DevOps in the CPS domain, in this paper we instantiate part of the reference architecture presented in the H2020 Adeptness project, which is based on microservices that allow for the continuous deployment, monitoring and validation of CPSs. To this end, we elaborate a systematic methodology that considers as input both domain expertise and a previously defined taxonomy for DevOps in the CPS domain. We obtain a generic microservice template that can be used in any kind of CPS. In addition, we instantiate this architecture in the context of an industrial case study from the elevation domain.