Toward a Science of Cyber–Physical System Integration

Authors: Janos Sztipanovits, Xenofon Koutsoukos, Gabor Karsai, Nicholas Kottenstette, Panos Antsaklis, Vijay Gupta, Bill Goodwine, John Baras, Shige Wang

Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 100, No. 1, pp. 29-44, January 2012

ABSTRACT | System integration is the elephant in the china
store of large-scale cyber–physical system (CPS) design. It
would be hard to find any other technology that is more undervalued
scientifically and at the same time has bigger impact on
the presence and future of engineered systems. The unique
challenges in CPS integration emerge from the heterogeneity of
components and interactions. This heterogeneity drives the
need for modeling and analyzing cross-domain interactions
among physical and computational/networking domains and
demands deep understanding of the effects of heterogeneous
abstraction layers in the design flow. To address the challenges
of CPS integration, significant progress needs to be made toward
a new science and technology foundation that is model
based, precise, and predictable. This paper presents a theory of
composition for heterogeneous systems focusing on stability.
Specifically, the paper presents a passivity-based design approach
that decouples stability from timing uncertainties
caused by networking and computation. In addition, the paper
describes cross-domain abstractions that provide effective
solution for model-based fully automated software synthesis
and high-fidelity performance analysis. The design objectives
demonstrated using the techniques presented in the paper are
group coordination for networked unmanned air vehicles
(UAVs) and high-confidence embedded control software design
for a quadrotor UAV. Open problems in the area are also discussed,
including the extension of the theory of compositional
design to guarantee properties beyond stability, such as safety
and performance.

KEYWORDS | Control engineering computing; embedded software;
system analysis and design