The design of cyber-physical systems can be very time consuming and costly due to the multi-disciplinary nature and the challenges that come with it. Some of the challenges lay in the design procedure. Errors that are discovered further in the process have a high cost of change. Also different type of models during the design are made, which lags interoperability. The developed method that is used in this research assignment to design cyber-physical systems is the structured design method. This method uses an iterative approach with an inner and outer cycle to implement different control features. In every iteration of the outer cycle a new control feature is added and at every iteration in the inner cycle a more detailed and complex model is used to test and tune the implementation of that feature.
The goal of this research assignment is to investigate the applicability of the structured design method for systems with a focus on discrete-events. In discrete-event systems the control decisions depend on discrete asynchronous in- and output events and that changes the way in which control decisions are made. Due to the distributed nature of cyber-physical systems and therefore the necessary communication between these systems, the communication is also investigated which can also be seen as discrete-event behavior.
The structured design method is applied for the design of a controller for the production cell demo setup which consist for a large part of discrete-event systems. In this way the method can be tested on generality and applicability to answer the research questions.