Architectural Allocation Alternatives and Associated Concerns in Cyber-Physical Systems: A Case Study

Cyber-physical systems is an extension of traditional embedded systems, where communication to the outside world is given more emphasis. This leads to a new design space also for software development, allowing new allocation strategies for functionality. In traditional embedded systems, all functionality was inside the product, but now it becomes possible to partition the software between the embedded systems and IT systems outside the product. This paper investigates, through a case study from the automotive domain, possible new allocation alternatives where computation is offloaded from the embedded system to a server, and what additional architectural concerns this leads to, including performance, resource utilization, robustness, and lifecycle aspects. In addition, the paper addresses new opportunities created by allocating functionality outside the embedded systems, and thus making data available for extended services, as well as the larger concerns that result on the organizational level, including new competency in architecture and DevOps