Towards the automatic generation and management of plant models for the validation of highly configurable cyber-physical systems

The number of cyber-physical systems is increasing considerably, being very usual in automation systems. Many cyber-physical systems must deal with variability issues to give response to the current market needs. The use of a plant model that simulates the system controlled by the embedded system might ease verification and validation activities, but building plant models manually for cyber-physical systems with many variants can be time consuming and error prone. This paper proposes a methodology that semi-automatically generates plant models in Simulink, with the main purpose of handling variability issues to validate highly configurable cyber-physical systems.