A descriptive engineering approach for cyber-physical systems

Plug and produce (PnP) aims at reducing system engineering effort. Therefore several PnP aspects have to be solved. This paper gives an overview and classifies process types and PnP aspects. Furthermore it identifies coupled processes as the most challenging ones and provides a new engineering approach for such systems. A new two-step descriptive engineering approach is applied to automatically synthesise control code from a given product specification. The main idea of the approach is to use a descriptive view rather than a prescriptive. This means that the engineer specifies what he wants to produce and no longer how he wants to produce it. Thus, it reduces engineering effort and releases more resources to optimize the process.