Gossiping Components for Cyber-Physical Systems

Developing software for dynamic cyber-physical systems (CPS) is a complex task. One has to deal with the dynamicity and unreliability of the physical environment where the software resides in, while, at the same time, provide sufficient levels of dependability and scalability. Although emerging software engineering abstractions, such as dynamic ad-hoc component ensembles, provide a convenient way to structure software for dynamic CPS, they need to be mapped to robust decentralized execution schemes in real-life settings. A particular challenge in this context is the robust distributed data dissemination in dynamic networks. Gossip-based communication stands as a promising solution to this challenge. We argue, that exploitation of application-specific information, software architecture in particular, has a large potential for improving the robustness and performance of gossip-based communication. This paper proposes a synergy between high-level architectural models and low-level communication models to effectively enable application-specific gossiping in component-based systems. The synergy is exemplified on the DEECo component model which is tailored to the needs and specifics of CPS, and evaluated on an emergency coordination case study with realistic network configurations.