Foundation Models for Software Engineering of Cyber-Physical Systems: the Road Ahead

TL;DR

This paper articulates a comprehensive roadmap for applying foundation models to the software engineering of cyber-physical systems, arguing for leveraging multimodal FM capabilities beyond traditional LLMs to handle CPS data diversity across requirements, design, development, testing, debugging, and evolution. It outlines concrete opportunities and challenges in each lifecycle phase, including interactive modeling, digital twin creation, safety-critical code development, test generation, and autonomous evolution, while addressing artifacts' correctness, uncertainty, and ethical concerns. The authors advocate domain-specific fine-tuning, human-in-the-loop collaboration, and hybrid approaches that combine FM strengths with traditional engineering methods to ensure reliability in safety-critical CPS environments. The work aims to guide researchers and practitioners toward robust, scalable, and trustworthy FM-enabled CPS software engineering through detailed phase-specific directions and cross-cutting considerations.

Abstract

FMs, particularly LLMs, are increasingly used to support various software engineering activities (e.g., coding and testing). Their applications in the software engineering of CPSs are also growing. However, research in this area remains limited. Moreover, existing studies have primarily focused on LLMs-only one type of FM-leaving ample opportunities to explore others, such as vision-language models. We argue that, in addition to LLMs, other FMs utilizing different data modalities (e.g., images, audio) and multimodal models (which integrate multiple modalities) hold great potential for supporting CPS software engineering, given that these systems process diverse data types. To address this, we present a research roadmap for integrating FMs into various phases of CPS software engineering, highlighting key research opportunities and challenges for the software engineering community. Moreover, we discuss the common challenges associated with applying FMs in this context, including the correctness of FM-generated artifacts, as well as the inherent uncertainty and hallucination associated with FMs. This roadmap is intended for researchers and practitioners in CPS software engineering, providing future research directions using FMs in this domain.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: Challenges and Opportunities of for Software Engineering of
• Figure 2: Architecture of Cyber-physical Systems