VIADUCT - Bridging the Gap between Testbeds and Real-World Cyber-Physical Systems.

The success of the fourth industrial revolution hinges on the ability to deploy robust cyber-physical systems that monitor and control physical processes. Testbeds are state of the art tools for evaluating such systems according to the execution requirements of the application, i.e., evaluating how the cyber-physical system interacts with the device upon which it is implemented on. However, the validation of a cyberphysical system must also consider the reactive requirements of the application, which define how the cyber-physical system interacts with the underlying physical process it is designed to monitor and control. We advocate that a new testbed infrastructure is needed that facilitates the evaluation of execution and reaction requirements simultaneously. We present the design and implementation of VIADUCT, a novel testbed infrastructure that models the physical process under consideration, and injects stimulus into the cyberphysical system using time synchronized hardware interfaces. An experimental evaluation demonstrates how the testbed simultaneously evaluates execution and reaction requirements with a precision and scalability that surpasses the capabilities of state of the art testbeds, thereby bringing testing infrastructure one step closer to evaluating real-world cyber-physical systems.