Metamodeling Approach for the Design of Cyber-Physical Systems

Background/Objectives: The design of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) needs an approach that allows us to model effectively their heterogeneous components, having both a computational and a physical nature. To contribute to this area, a new metamodeling approach for designing CPS is proposed in this paper. Methods: The metamodeling approach allows CPS designers the development of the metamodels in the different ma-thematical semantics (e.g., graph-based, vector-based, geometry-based). This is possible due to the introduc-tion of the additional level of the metamodeling architecture (M4), which expresses the studied domain in terms of sets. To prove that M4 is mathematically sufficient for producing all considered in the paper meta-metamodels (M3s), we give definitions of M3s in terms of M4, i.e. as having algebraic structure subsets. Re-sults: To prove the concept, a geometrical meta-metamodel , linking physical properties of multidimen-sional domains with their spatial structure, is proposed. Structural analysis of physical models showed the possible alphabet of , which includes corresponding to the dimensions of the space metatypes; this has been a common result of abstraction from a geometrical structure of physical objects. Using the geometrical meta-metamodel allows us to unify the representation of the spatial information at different levels of the CPS design. Conclusion/Application: The software tool that implements the proposed metamodeling ap-proach is currently under development by the authors. The tool enables designers to express the syntax and semantics of metamodels and apply them for modelling CPS.