Physical and Cyber Convergence Approach to Design
Future Complex Aviation Cyber Physical Systems
Wenqi Chen
Faculty of Computer Science and Technology
Guangdong University of Technology
Guangzhou, 510090, China
cwqi2015@qq.com
Abstract—Aviation Cyber-Physical Systems are the integration of
cyber systems and physical systems. Recent concentration to
Aviation Cyber Physical Systems (ACPS) is driven by the
demand for deeper Convergence of design disciplines that
integrate physical and computational worlds. In this paper, we
supply a new idea to support cyber-physical system design by
proposing multi-dimension and multi-domain approach; we take
a combination of different methodologies in a multi-formalism
approach from different views. The effectiveness of the approach
is illustrated by means of one practical case study: specifying and
modeling Aviation Cyber-Physical Systems. We specify and
model Aviation Cyber-Physical Systems with integrating
Modelica and Architecture Analysis & Design Language
(AADL), the physical world is modeled by Modelica, the cyber
part is modeled by AADL.
Keywords-component; Convergence; Aviation Cyber Physical
System; CPS; Modelica; AADL; Spatial-Temporal Features;
Dynamic Continuous Features
I. INTRODUCTION
Over the past 100 years, aviation has ascended from humble
beginnings to an indispensible transportation medium. Air
traffic management systems have helped to revolutionize the
safe and efficient transport of people and payloads.[1]. In 2006,
air transportation produced an estimated $3.5 trillion, nearly
8% of the world gross domestic income [2]. Modern aircraft
avionics enable automation and provide pilots with
comprehensive, timely, and relevant information that improves
pilot situation awareness, decision-making, and workload in
critical flight phases[3].However, Aviation today is faced with
the grand challenge of accommodating a multi-fold increase in
air traffic and additional types of manned and unmanned
aircraft classes in the next two decades; while improving
passenger convenience, environmental footprint, and
stakeholder business. Airspace systems worldwide are now
modernizing, refreshing or replacing aging infrastructures in
ground and space, with the intent of substantially improving
the capacity, safety, security, efficiency, and yield of aviation
and outpace future demands [4].
Aviation Cyber-Physical Systems are the integration of
cyber systems and physical systems [1]. Recent concentration
to Aviation Cyber Physical Systems (ACPS) is driven by the
demand for deeper Convergence of design disciplines that
integrate physical and computational worlds. Modeling the
heterogeneous composition of physical world part,
____________________________________
978-1-47-- /1/$31.00 ©201 IEEE
This work is supported by the national natural science foundation of China
under grant (No.61370082, No.61173046).

Lichen Zhang*
Faculty of Computer Science and Technology
Guangdong University of Technology
Guangzhou, 510090, China
zhanglichen1962@163.com
computational part and communication part of aviation cyber
physical systems is an enormous challenge in engineering
aviation cyber physical systems because of the causality, time
semantics, spatial reasoning, and different physical domains
[5].
It is inherent to the design of cyber-physical systems that the
design process has to cover different application domains. Each
domain has different views on technical and physical details.
As a consequence to cyber-physical systems design, the design
methodology has to consider all these different aspects [6]. To
cope with this problem, we introduce a new approach for
system modeling. We supply a new idea to support cyber-
physical system design by proposing multi-dimension, multi-
domain approach; we take a combination of different
methodologies in a multi-formalism approach from different
views. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by
means of one practical case study: specifying and modeling
Aviation Cyber-Physical Systems We specify and model
Aviation Cyber-Physical Systems with integrating Modelica
[7] and Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL)
[8], the physical world is modeled by Modelica, the cyber part
is modeled by AADL.
II. CONVERGENCE OF PHYSICAL SYSTEM AND CYBER
SYSTEM MODELING METHODS FOR AVIATION CYBER
PHYSICAL SYSTEM DESIGN
System convergence is a big obstacle to good aviation
cyber–physical system (ACPS) design, which is due to a lack
of an adequate scientific theoretical foundation for the subject.
System convergence is particularly challenging in ACPS where
fundamentally different physical and computational design
concerns intersect [9] [10].
In this paper, we advocate a multi-dimension and multi-
domain approach to the development of cyber physical
systems, based on the identification of complementary
dimensions and views on the system as starting point for
modeling and design as shown in Fig.1.

Figure 1. Multi-dimension and multi-domain approach to develop cyber
physical systems
The physical world of aviation cyber physical systems can
be regarded as a configuration of connected physical entities
which have ideal reversible or ideal irreversible behavior.
Differential equations are a common representation for
continuous physical world behavior [9].The physical world
always resides in the continuous and continual domain,
expresses quantities changing smoothly without discrete steps,
and continual, the changes in the phenomena continues
uninterrupted over time. Thus, offering requirements that
specify the ordering of events and the real-time properties of a
system are not sufficient in physical modeling.
We use Modelica to make an environment analysis for
physical world of aerospace cyber-physical system. Multi-
domain modeling of Modelica is a very modern expression for
approaches that provide so called physical modeling when
combining components from different domains. Physical
modeling means that the basic modeling aim is to keep the
physical structure of a real system or its topology as much as
possible in the model. Modelica is a language that is based on
causal modeling for physical behavior description of physical
world, and it has been developed to ease library development
for models sharing and reuse. Modelica supports several
formalisms: ordinary differential equations (ODE), differential
algebraic equations (DAE), bond graphs, finite state automata,
Petri nets etc [11]. Modelica allows models to be defined in a
declarative manner, modularly and hierarchically and various
formalisms to be integrated in the more general Modelica
formalism. The multi-domain modeling capability of Modelica
allows integrating electrical, mechanical, hydraulic,
thermodynamic, etc., model components within the same
model of aviation cyber physical systems. [12].
The main difficulty lies in developing an integrated model
that represents both cyber and physical aspects with high
fidelity. Modelica does not have mechanisms to formally
analyze the software aspects of the design, including thread
scheduling, timing, and concurrency checking. We must
integrate other formalisms to model cyber part of aviation
cyber physical systems. Among existing techniques, an
approach to integrate Modelica with The Architecture Analysis
& Design Language (AADL) is a suitable choice, as it can
encapsulate diverse attributes of aviation cyber physical
systems [13]. AADL provides quantitative analysis of the
runtime architecture of the aviation cyber physical systems

with multiple critical operational properties, such as time
analysis, safety-criticality, security, and reliability by enabling
a model of the system to be annotated with information
relevant to each of these quality concerns and AADL to be
extended with analysis-specific properties .It supports
modeling software runtime architecture, the system hardware,
and the interface to the physical environment of aviation cyber
physical systems and system. It was developed to support a full
model based engineering lifecycle including system
specification, modeling, analysis, simulation, integration, and
upgrade by providing modeling and analysis at multiple levels
of fidelity. A system can be automatically integrated from
AADL models when fully specified, modeled and when source
code is provided for the software components [14].AADL
defines two main extension mechanisms: property sets and
sublanguages (known as Annexes). Properties are label-value
pairs used to annotate components. These properties can be
grouped into named sets. Sublanguages (Annexes), on the other
hand, enable the encoding of complex statements about
components for which syntactic verification makes sense. [15].
III. CASE STUDY: MODELING AIRCRAFT SYSTEM
Modern aircraft are often aerodynamically unstable by
physical design to improve flight performance and rely on a
high rate digital control system for stability. Furthermore,
coupling higher-level flight management systems with flight
controls enables optimization of an aircraft route under various
physical world constraints, such as fuel, noise, time, potential
threats, and “no-fly zones,” and efficiently offers automation
and decision support capabilities to pilots. Consequently, flight
deck functions, such as flight control and management,
collision avoidance, positioning, tracking and navigation,
controller and pilot interactions, and weather sensing, are
jointly performed, with the pilot transformed to an operator of a
complex network of software-based systems that manage
virtually every aspect of flight [16]. Over the last three decades
civil aircraft systems have become progressively more
integrated between structure, power, control and software. This
requires different disciplines to fully express the functionality
of the system under design. As the system-elements are tightly
coupled, hence their mechatronics nature, so the different
disciplines needed to design the system have become tightly
coupled [17].
The aircraft can be modeled using the convergence approach
of physical system and cyber system modeling methods
through integrating Modelica with AADL as shown in Fig. 2.
Figure 2. Integrating Modelica with AADL to develop aircraft system
 Fig. 3 represents the wheel model of aircraft using
Modelica.
Figure 3. The wheel model of aircraft using Modelica.
The cyber system of aircraft is modeled by aadl as follow:
system Cyber_Sytems_Aircraft
end Cyber_Sytems_Aircraft ;
system implementation Cyber_Sytems_Aircraft.impl
subcomponents
Measure: system MeasurePack::Measure.Impl;
Excute: system ExcutePack::Compute.Impl;
Compute: system ComputePack::Compute.Impl;
connections
BusAccessConnection1: bus access -> ;
BusAccessConnection2: bus access Measure.ToCompute
-> Compute.FromMeasure;
BusAccessConnection3: bus access Compute.ToExcute ->
Excute.FromCompute;
end Cyber_Sytems_Aircraft.impl;
Fig. 4. Represents the components of the measurement system
in AADL.
Figure 4. The components of the measurement system in AADL
IV. CONCLUSION
System convergence is a big obstacle to good aviation
cyber–physical system (ACPS) design, which is due to a lack

of an adequate scientific theoretical foundation for the subject.
In this paper, we supply a new idea to support cyber-physical
system design by proposing multi-dimension and multi-domain
approach; we take a combination of different methodologies in
a multi-formalism approach from different views. The
effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by means of one
practical case study: specifying and modeling Aviation Cyber-
Physical Systems. We specify and model Aviation Cyber-
Physical Systems with integrating Modelica and Architecture
Analysis & Design Language (AADL), the physical world is
modeled by Modelica, the cyber part is modeled by AADL.
Future work focuses on the integration formal methods with
AADL and Modelica.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is supported by the national natural science
foundation of China under grant (No.61370082, No.61173046).
REFERENCES
[1] Krishna Sampigethaya, Radha Poovendran: Aviation Cyber-Physical
Systems: Foundations for Future Aircraft and Air Transport.
Proceedings of the IEEE 101(8): 1834-1855 (2013)
[2] K. Sampigethaya, R. Poovendran and L. Bushnell, Secure Operation,
Control and Maintenance of Future eEnabled Airplanes, Proceedings of
the IEEE, Special issue on Aviation Information Systems, vol. 96, no.
12, pp. 1992-2007, December 2008.
[3] K. Sampigethaya and R. Poovendran, Transportation CPS: Insights from
Aviation on Major Challenges and Directions, invited (position paper),
NSF Transportation CPS Workshop, 23-24 January 2014.
[4] Krishna Sampigethaya and Radha Poovendran. Cyber-Physical System
Framework for Future Aircraft and Air Traffic Control. 2012
IEEE/AIAA 31st Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC), 14-18
Oct. 2012, P 1-9
[5] Ella M. Atkins. Cyber-physical Aerospace:Challenges and Future
Directions in Transportation and Exploration Systems.
varma.ece.cmu.edu/cps/Position-Papers/Ella-Atkins.pdf
[6] Frank Slomka, Ste_en Kollmann, Ste_en Moser and Kilian Kemp. A
Multidisciplinary Design Methodology for Cyber-physical Systems.
www.cs.kuleuven.be/~stefanv/public_html/.../ACES-MB02.pdf
[7] Mattsson, S.E., Elmqvist, H., Otter, M..Physical system modeling with
Modelica. Control Engineering Practice, vol. 6, pp. 501-510, 1998
[8] Feiler P H, Gluch D P, Hudak J J. The architecture analysis & design
language (AADL): An introduction[R]. CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIV
PITTSBURGH PA SOFTWARE ENGINEERING INST, 2006.
[9] Janos Sztipanovits: Cyber Physical Systems - Convergence of Physical
and Information Sciences. it - Information Technology 54(6): 257-265
(2012)
[10] Janos Sztipanovits, Xenofon D. Koutsoukos, Gabor Karsai, Nicholas
Kottenstette, Panos J. Antsaklis, Vijay Gupta, Bill Goodwine, John S.
Baras, Shige Wang: Toward a Science of Cyber-Physical System
Integration. Proceedings of the IEEE 100(1): 29-44 (2012)
[11] Elmqvist H, Mattson SE, Otter M. Modelica—A language for physical
system modeling, visualization and interaction, Proceedings of the 1999
IEEE International Symposium on Computer Aided Control System
Design Kohala Coast-Island of Hawai'i, Hawai'i, USA August 22-27,
1999
[12] Fritzson, P.: Modelica - a cyber-physical modeling language and the
openmodelica environment. In: IWCMC, pp. 1648–1653. IEEE (2011)
[13] Feiler, P. H., Lewis, B. A., & Vestal, S. (2006). The SAE Architecture
Analysis & Design Language (AADL) a standard for engineering
performance critical systems. In Computer Aided Control System
Design, 2006 I.E. International Conference on Control Applications,
2006 I.E. International Symposium on Intelligent Control (pp. 1206–
1211).
[14] Lewis, B ; Feiler, P. Multi-dimensional Model Based Engineering Using
AADL, RSP '08., The 19th IEEE/IFIP International Symposium on
Rapid System Prototyping, 2008., Page(s): xv – xviii
[15] Dionisio de Niz and Peter H. Feiler. Aspects in the industry standard
AADL. AOM '07 Proceedings of the 10th international workshop on
Aspect-oriented modeling.P15 – 20, 2007
[16] K. Sampigethaya, R. Poovendran, "Cyber-Physical Integration in Future
Aviation Information Systems," in 31th IEEE/AIAA Digital Avionics
Systems Conference, October 2012. Best Paper of Session Award in
Avionics Information Management session
[17] Simoni Serena. Development of a Multi-Physics model of a Civil
Aircraft for Ground Manoeuvres using Modelica.
http://etd.adm.unipi.it/t/etd-05192007-165436/