Designing Cyberphysical Systems Software Components for Middleware Interoperability

Modern software frameworks for cyber–physical systems rely on component-oriented architectures, yet existing frameworks often couple these principles to specific operating systems and middleware technologies, limiting design flexibility and interoperability. This paper presents Abstraction-Based And Component-Oriented Systems (ABACOS), an abstraction-based framework that decouples component execution from communication mechanisms through a small set of orthogonal software abstractions. Components interact only through Input and Output Ports, allowing different middleware backends to be bound at deployment time without modifying functional behavior. A C++ implementation of ABACOS was evaluated using Data Distribution Service (DDS) and Scalable ServiceOriented Middleware over IP (SOME/IP) transports, with end-toend latency measurements collected across multiple payload sizes. The results show that the overhead introduced by ABACOS remains small, with median values of only a few microseconds and is largely independent of payload size, indicating that interoperability can be achieved without materially altering the timing characteristics of the underlying middleware. These findings support the use of ABACOS as a foundation for low-overhead, middleware-agnostic CPS software architectures.