Caosd Research group

With the increasing size and heterogeneity of systems (e.g., IoT, Cyber-Physical Systems) and enhanced power and versatility of IoT devices (e.g., smart watches, home intelligence sensors), the complexity of managing different kinds of variability for a given vertical domain becomes more difficult to handle. The structural variability of cyber-physical systems becomes more complex, comprising not only the inherent hardware variability of IoT devices and their network access protocols, but also the infrastructure variability derived from modern virtualization technologies, such as microcontainers or unikernels. Variability of software frameworks used to develop domain specific applications and/or services for Cloud/Edge computing environments should not be intermingled with hardware, and infrastructure variability modelling. In addition, to exploit the full potential of flexibility in processing, data storage and networking resource management, experts should define dynamic configuration processes that optimise QoS such as energy efficiency or latency respecting application-specific requirements. In this keynote talk, I will present how QoS assurance in cyber-physical systems implies modelling and configuring different kinds of variability during design, but also at runtime (e.g., user demands, usage context variability), enabling the late binding of dynamic variation points, distributed in IoT/Edge/Cloud devices, and how this can be materialized using current SPL artefacts.