Accurate and reliable knowledge of time is fundamental to cyber-physical systems for sensing, control, performance, and energy efficient integration of computing and communications. This statement underlies the proposal. Emerging CPS applications depend on precise knowledge of time to infer location and control communication. There is a diversity of semantics used to describe time, and quality of time varies as we move up and down the system stack. System designs tend to overcompensate for these uncertainties and the result is systems that may be over designed, inefficient, and fragile. The intellectual merit derives from the new and fundamental concept of time and the holistic measure of quality of time (QoT) that captures metrics including resolution, accuracy, and stability. The proposal builds a system stack ("ROSELINE") that enables new ways for clock hardware, operating system, network services, and applications to learn, maintain and exchange information about time, influence component behavior, and robustly adapt to dynamic QoT requirements, as well as to benign and adversarial changes in operating conditions. Application areas that will benefit from Quality of Time will include: smart grad, networked and coordinated control of aerospace systems, underwater sensing, and industrial automation. The broader impact of the proposal is due to the foundational nature of the work which builds a robust and tunable quality of time that can be applied across a broad spectrum of applications that pervade modern life. The proposal will also provide valuable opportunities to integrate research and education in graduate, undergraduate, and K-12 classrooms. There will be extensive outreach through publications, open sourcing of software, and participation in activities such as the Los Angeles Computing Circle for pre-college students.

Accurate and reliable knowledge of time is fundamental to cyber-physical systems for sensing, control, performance, and energy efficient integration of computing and communications. This statement underlies the proposal. Emerging CPS applications depend on precise knowledge of time to infer location and control communication. There is a diversity of semantics used to describe time, and quality of time varies as we move up and down the system stack. System designs tend to overcompensate for these uncertainties and the result is systems that may be over designed, inefficient, and fragile. The intellectual merit derives from the new and fundamental concept of time and the holistic measure of quality of time (QoT) that captures metrics including resolution, accuracy, and stability. The proposal builds a system stack ("ROSELINE") that enables new ways for clock hardware, operating system, network services, and applications to learn, maintain and exchange information about time, influence component behavior, and robustly adapt to dynamic QoT requirements, as well as to benign and adversarial changes in operating conditions. Application areas that will benefit from Quality of Time will include: smart grad, networked and coordinated control of aerospace systems, underwater sensing, and industrial automation. The broader impact of the proposal is due to the foundational nature of the work which builds a robust and tunable quality of time that can be applied across a broad spectrum of applications that pervade modern life. The proposal will also provide valuable opportunities to integrate research and education in graduate, undergraduate, and K-12 classrooms. There will be extensive outreach through publications, open sourcing of software, and participation in activities such as the Los Angeles Computing Circle for pre-college students.

Accurate and reliable knowledge of time is fundamental to cyber-physical systems for sensing, control, performance, and energy efficient integration of computing and communications. This statement underlies the proposal. Emerging CPS applications depend on precise knowledge of time to infer location and control communication. There is a diversity of semantics used to describe time, and quality of time varies as we move up and down the system stack. System designs tend to overcompensate for these uncertainties and the result is systems that may be over designed, inefficient, and fragile. The intellectual merit derives from the new and fundamental concept of time and the holistic measure of quality of time (QoT) that captures metrics including resolution, accuracy, and stability. The proposal builds a system stack ("ROSELINE") that enables new ways for clock hardware, operating system, network services, and applications to learn, maintain and exchange information about time, influence component behavior, and robustly adapt to dynamic QoT requirements, as well as to benign and adversarial changes in operating conditions. Application areas that will benefit from Quality of Time will include: smart grad, networked and coordinated control of aerospace systems, underwater sensing, and industrial automation. The broader impact of the proposal is due to the foundational nature of the work which builds a robust and tunable quality of time that can be applied across a broad spectrum of applications that pervade modern life. The proposal will also provide valuable opportunities to integrate research and education in graduate, undergraduate, and K-12 classrooms. There will be extensive outreach through publications, open sourcing of software, and participation in activities such as the Los Angeles Computing Circle for pre-college students.

The objective of this research is to address issues related to the platform revolution leading to a third generation of networked control systems. The approach is to address four fundamental issues: (i) How to provide delay guarantees over communication networks to support networked control? (ii) How to synchronize clocks over networks so as to enable consistent and timely control actions? (iii) What is an appropriate architecture to support mechanisms for reliable yet flexible control system design? (iv) How to provide cross-domains proofs of proper performance in both cyber and physical domains? Intellectual Merit: Currently neither theory nor networking protocols provide solutions for communication with delay constraints. Coordination by time is fundamental to the next generation of event-cum-time-driven systems that cyber-physical systems constitute. Managing delays and timing in architecture is fundamental for cyberphysical systems. Broader Impact: Process, aerospace, and automotive industries rely critically on feedback control loops. Any platform revolution will have major consequences. Enabling control over networks will give rise to new large scale applications, e.g., the grand challenge of developing zero-fatality highway systems, by networking cars traveling on a highway. This research will train graduate students on this new technology of networked control. The Convergence Lab (i) has employed minority undergraduate students, including a Ron McNair Scholar, as well as other undergraduate and high school researchers, (ii) hosts hundreds of high/middle/elementary school students annually in Engineering Open House. The research results will be presented at conferences and published in open literature.