SEF4CPSIoT Software Engineering Framework for Cyber-Physical and IoT Systems

Introduction

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and the Internet of Things (IoT) is on the rapid increase as the demand for such applications is growing exponentially. There is a very strong reason for connecting three technologies such as CPS, IoT, and Cloud as the first two are connected to a cloud for receiving and analysing data. Cloud computing has emerged to provide a more cost-effective solution to businesses and services while making use of inexpensive computing solutions that combines pervasive, Internet, and virtualisation technologies. Cloud computing has spread to catch up with another technological evolution as we have witnessed Internet technology which has revolutionised communication and information superhighway. Cloud computing is emerging rapidly and software as a service paradigm is increasing its demand for more services. However, this new trend needs to be more systematic with respect to developing secure software engineering and its related processes such as requirements, design, development, and test. For example, current challenges that are faced with cybersecurity are: application security flaws and lessons learned which can all be applied when developing applications for CPS and IoT systems. Similarly, as the demand for cloud services increases and so increased importance sought for security and privacy. Cloud service providers such as Microsoft, Google, Salesforce.com, Amazon, GoGrid are able to leverage cloud technology with a pay-per-use business model with on-demand elasticity by which resources can be expanded or shortened based on service requirements. CPS and IoT combined have great potential to evolve new applications such as smart homes, smart cities, smart roads, smart transports, smart grids, etc. Let us take, smart home which can connect several devices such as smart home security cameras, smart home monitoring systems with machine learning to predict abnormalities, smart detection sensors to detect movement in the house when you are away, smart speakers such as Alexa, Google Home, and Siri, smartphone apps connected to home energy supply, smart kitchen utensils such as smart fridge, smart dishwasher, smart oven, smart heating systems, smart radiator valve, etc. However, existing work on smart home applications by Varghese & Hayajneh (2018), Hu, Yang, Lin, & Wang (2020), & Yassein, Hmeidi, Shatnawi, Mardini, & Khamayseh (2019) reported that “the current security mechanisms are insufficient as developer mistakes cannot be effectively detected and notified due to lack of applying systematic software development principles”.

There are varying definitions and understanding of these two terms found in the literature as follows:

Alur (2015) defines CPS as:

McEwen and Cassimally (2014) defines IoT as: