Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) technology combines computer science with the physical world of sensors, actuators and robotics. CPS provides a way to develop intelligent, smart, connected devices that can impact the lives of people in industries as diverse as transportation, energy, health, security and manufacturing.
CPS research must address many critical challenges to provide the capability, adaptability, scalability and resiliency needed for the next generation of smart systems. These challenges are related to the tight coupling of physical and computational elements in CPS, such as real-time control, data management and networked sensing, that must be integrated across multiple disciplines and domains to achieve the desired functionality and salient characteristics of a system.
In addition, because CPS systems interact with the physical environment in which they operate, their behavior is often determined by time-varying factors that vary on scales of microseconds to months or years and from on-chip to perhaps planetary size. These variations introduce significant challenges to the system design, operation and reliability of CPSs.
A key challenge in CPS is that of predicting, in an unbiased manner, the performance of CPSs. This requires understanding the interplay between system performance and real-world factors such as environmental dynamics, hardware architectures and components, communication networks, system-level optimizations, and the interaction of these with the dynamics of individual devices.
To enable better engineering of CPSs, we must improve the models used to describe them. Deterministic models are the kingpin of both the industrial and digital revolutions and provide a framework for understanding physical phenomena, but they are limited by the timing tolerances of underlying logic, and by the complexity of software-based modeling. A new theoretical paradigm that combines the continuous-time models of differential equations with event-triggered logical systems is required. This will allow us to model and predict the performance of CPSs in a more quantitative manner than is possible with current methods.
A related challenge is CPS Technology Overview that of designing, verifying and testing CPSs. Currently, designers and engineers are forced to overdesign their systems in order to meet hard real-time requirements. This can result in over-provisioning of resources and excessive cost, and it can also lead to a lack of system agility and resiliency. We need new methods to ensure compositional verification and validation of CPSs, from their underlying hardware to the software they run on.
In addition, we need new tools that provide expanded and effective access to means of conceiving of novel products, reducing product concepts to realizable designs, and producing integrated software-hardware systems at a pace far exceeding today's timelines. Specifically, we need new means of coordinating, co-simulating and sharing information among different engineering disciplines, including design, manufacturing, control, and software engineering.
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