Self-Adaptive Control in Cyber-Physical Systems: The Autonomous Train Experiment

Autonomous systems become more and more important in today’s transport sector. They often operate in dynamic environments in which unpredictable events may occur at any time. These events may affect the safe operation of vehicles, calling for highly efficient control software technologies to reason about and react on their appearance. A crucial efficiency parameter is timeliness as vehicles often operate under high speed. The contribution of this paper is the presentation and analysis of design aspects of dynamic control software in the context of an autonomous train experiment. This is achieved through a self-adaptation software framework intended for autonomous trains and built on a demonstrator using Lego Mindstorms. The main mission of the framework is to collect context information, reason about it, and adapt the train behavior accordingly. The adaptation framework is implemented using the development tool Reactive Blocks and tested on the demonstrator. The evaluation results provide useful insights into the performance of the framework, particularly about the time needed to reason about the context and to carry out reconfigurations.