AMon: A domain-specific language and framework for adaptive monitoring of Cyber–Physical Systems

Journal article, 2023

Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS) are increasingly used in safety–critical scenarios where ensuring their correct behavior at runtime becomes a crucial task. Therefore, the behavior of the CPS needs to be monitored at runtime so that violations of requirements can be detected. With the inception of edge devices that facilitate runtime analysis at the edge and the increasingly diverse environments that CPS operate in, flexible monitoring approaches are needed that consider the data that needs to be monitored and the analyses performed on that data. In this paper, we propose AMon, a flexible adaptive monitoring framework that supports the specification and validation of monitoring adaptation rules, using a domain-specific language. Based on these rules, AMon automatically generates code for direct deployment onto devices. We evaluated AMon by applying it to TurtleBot Robots and a fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Furthermore, we conducted a user study assessing the understandability and ease of use of our language. Results show that creating multiple adaptation rules with our DSL is feasible with minimal effort, and that adaptive monitoring can reduce the amount of runtime data transmitted from the edge device according to the current state of the system and its monitoring needs.