ArchEx: An Extensible Framework for the Exploration of Cyber-Physical System Architectures.

We present ArchEx, a framework for cyber-physical system architecture exploration. We formulate the exploration problem as a mapping problem, where \"virtual\" components are mapped into \"real\" components from pre-defined libraries to minimize an objective function while guaranteeing that system requirements are satisfied. ArchEx leverages an extensible set of patterns to enable formal, yet flexible, requirement specification, a graph-based internal representation of the system architecture, and algorithms based on mixed integer linear programming to solve the mapping problem. Its effectiveness is demonstrated on two industrial case studies: an aircraft power distribution network and a reconfigurable automated production line.