High-confidence cyber-physical co-design

Abstract

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) [4] are characterized by combining computations, networks, and physical processes. Engineering cyber-physical systems is not new; high-end automobiles have for decades included complex embedded systems that interact with the physical environment. As an intellectual discipline, however, CPS design poses both new opportunities and challenges. The rapid development of a CPS with high-confidence of its functional correctness is a co-design problem ---the design of the cyber part (embedded control systems and networks) and the physical part influence each other. For instance, when designing an industrial robot, the thickness of the robot arms changes the physical behavior of the system; thinner arms have less inertia and can move faster, but introduce more flexibility and spring behavior, making the control algorithm harder to design. As a consequence, to meet increasingly challenging systemlevel objectives, the cyber and physical parts need to be concurrently designed.