Human-interactive hardware-in-the-loop simulation framework for cyber-physical systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is a complex system consisting of physical elements including sensors and actuators, and computing elements to control these physical elements. It is composed of distributed heterogeneous systems and operates in a complicated operating environment including the human factors such as military, aerospace, smart vehicles, medical systems, and so on. In these domains, systems require the high reliability and must be adapted in the unpredictable and uncertain conditions, so that system testing is very important and essential process. Generally, in order to test the functionality and performance of the hardware system, Hardware-In-the-Loop Simulation (HILS) is a widely used technique in many industrial areas. However, conventional HILS cannot be applied to CPS because it is mostly developed for a specific system in a non-distributed environment. In this paper, we propose a human-interactive HILS framework for CPS. As the proposed framework is developed to support the reliability and the reusability in a fully distributed operating environment, developers employing this framework may reduce a huge amount of boredom and time-consuming job, and guarantee the high reliability.