Software Engineering Institute

The practical, pragmatic benefits of building early architectural models of the embedded computing resources for cyber-physical systems (CPS) have been documented and demonstrated. However, the rate of adoption of this practice by the contractor community has been slow. Empirically, the SEI has observed skepticism about whether the value of these models justifies the increased cost of building them, but traditional methods of cost justification, such as return on investment (ROI), are inadequate in this case. An alternate approach is to use model-based methods to reduce integration and test risk in the absence of solid ROI data.