A Pattern-Based Approach for Designing Reliable Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) appear to be of paramount importance due to their increasing use on critical infrastructure. New challenges have occurred because of the nature and the complexity of such systems in supporting heterogeneous physical and cyber components simultaneously. Failures or attacks on system components decrease system reliability creating severe consequences to CPS and the attached applications. The construction of complex CPS with respect to security and dependability (S&D) properties is necessary to avoid system vulnerabilities at design level. Design patterns are solutions for reusable designs and interactions of objects. In this work we present a pattern-based language for designing CPS able to guarantee S&D properties. The first set of S&D patterns includes the Reliability Component Composition (RCC) Patterns for designing reliable CPS. RCC patterns are encoded in Drools, which is a rule-based reasoning system. To evaluate our approach, we use RCC patterns as a methodology for designing a reliable wireless sensor network attached to a physical architecture to send monitored data to a central controller through relay nodes and paths.