Cyber-physical modeling and simulation: A reference architecture for designing demonstrators for industrial cyber-physical systems

The application of models and simulations is well-established in systems engineering and development. To adapt this approach to the digital age, we propose the concept of “cyber-physical modeling and simulation (CPMS)” which enables to constitute cyber-physical systems (CPS) with scalable complexity, modularity and variability in size. Based thereon, we derive a reference architecture for designing demonstrators for industrial CPS. The reference architecture offers a structured design space and attributed components which constitute the demonstrators with regard to their application objectives and scenarios. As a viability assessment, we apply the proposed reference architecture by developing the instantiation “Portable Industrial Demonstrator for Cyber-Physical Systems (PID4CPS)”.