About the session
The IET Control and Automation TPN are hosting an evening lecture on cyber-physical systems, providing both an industrial and academic perspective. Cyber-physical systems are integrations of computation, networking and physical processes.The event will give an overview of the challenges that arise when embedding computing elements into physical systems and the industrial tools that are available for the design of cyber-physical systems.
The first part of the evening will include a selection of open problems that need to be solved in order for cyber-physical system design to become more of a science and less of an art. The speaker will look at some of the main technical problems in cyber-physical system design, including:
How best to merge abstractions from physics with computer science: the study of physical systems is based on differential equations, continuous mathematics and analogue data, whereas the study of computing systems is based on logical operations, discrete mathematics and digital data
The trade off of system performance, robustness and physical resources against timing and accuracy of measurements, communications, computations and model fidelity
The economic and societal potential of cyber-physical systems is significantly greater than what has been realized, while huge investments have been made over the years from government and private sector to develop the technology. There are still many challenges in designing and building cyber-physical systems including:
reliability
scalability
modularity at different levels of abstraction from both a software and hardware framework.
The second part of the evening will take a deep look into platform-based design techniques for cyber-physical systems, an approach that references to an explicit design process instead of focusing on isolated steps such as simulation, software synthesis or verification. Leveraging this approach, a case study will be presented of how cyber-physical systems are enabling smarter production factories of the future today.
