Cloud-based Testing for Context-Aware Cyber-Physical Systems

Kapitel i bok, 2012

Cloud-based applications like email services or office suites enable real-time collaboration and traceability for shared data from nearly anywhere by using a modern web-browser. Thus, a significant shift has happened to these common applications to focus only on their usage than on their maintenance. However, today’s software development projects spent a noteworthy amount of resources to setup and maintain necessary development tools–over and over again. Thus, a similar shift for these development tools in the future would enable to spend valuable resources more on the actual project’s goals than on the tools’ maintenance. Especially development projects for cyber-physical systems, which interact with the real life’s surroundings by relying on sensors and actuators, have specific needs when using cloud-based solutions. In this contribution, preconditions, design decisions, and limitations of a cloud-based testing approach for CPS are outlined and discussed on the example “Hesperia”. “Hesperia” bases on the experiences from the development of “Caroline”–an autonomously driving vehicle for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. “Hesperia” as a cloud-based testing approach was tested 2009 during the development of an autonomously driving vehicle at the University of California, Berkeley.