A Systematic Literature Review on Software Maintenance for Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are widely used in almost every sector of our modern life. They are also changing the way how systems are designed and maintained as CPS represent a combination of hardware and software components. Thus, the maintenance of CPS is challenging due to the various components that are involved, including embedded software technologies, internet of things (IoT), machine to machine interactions, connectivity and wireless networks. In this paper, we performed a systematic literature review of the existing studies related to software maintenance of CPS starting from January 2006 until December 2020. After extensive manual analysis and filtering, we identified a total of 109 primary studies that we deeply analyzed through different criteria to answer four main research questions about software maintenance activities, techniques, types and evaluation methods used in CPS. Based on the data collected from this survey, we created a taxonomy to classify the existing research works, identified research trends, and highlighted gaps in the literature and avenues for further research in the field.