Towards a modeling language for cyber-physical systems

A cyber-physical system (CPS) is an interactive system of continuous plants and real-time controller programs. These systems usually feature a tight relationship between the physical and computational components and exhibit true concurrency with respect to time. These communication and concurrency issues have been well investigated in event based synchronous languages but only for discrete systems. In this paper, we investigate the distinct features of CPS and propose an imperative-style language framework for the programming of CPS. To characterize the semantics of the language, a set of algebraic laws are provided, which can be used to reduce arbitrary program into normal form. The programs in the normal form exhibit clear time-consuming and instantaneous behaviors. Moreover, the algebraic laws can be used in the transformation from the high level hybrid program specification to low level controller programs interacting with the physical plants. We will investigate this part in the follow-up work.