Growing demands on our civil infrastructure have heightened the need for smart structural components and systems whose behavior and performance can be controlled under a variety of loading scenarios such as high winds and earthquakes. However, due to the sheer size, scale and cost of most civil engineering structures, design and testing of such smart structures needs to be conducted using a hybrid cyber-physical approach where the infrastructure system in question, for example a bridge, is studied by coupling a small number of physical components with a numerical model of the rest of the structure. Undoubtedly, the success of such a hybrid approach, especially for dynamic real-time applications, hinges on effective integration of the cyber and physical components of the system. This project provides the essential building blocks and a computational integration platform to enable real-time hybrid testing of civil engineering structures. Design and development of physical components, multi-level numerical models, and real-time control algorithms will be conducted at Purdue University. Washington University will provide an adaptive, configurable concurrency platform and communication mechanisms that meet the strict scheduling constraints of real-time cyber-physical systems. The two institutions will collaboratively design a prototype system and conduct extensive testing to validate the integration of the various components and evaluate system performance. Specifications, software, benchmarks, and data developed during the course of this project will be made freely available to the cyber-physical research community. In addition to directly advancing the state-of-the-art in real-time hybrid testing, this research will also impact the areas of avionics, automotive design, smart grids for distributed power transmission and similar applications in other domains.

Growing demands on our civil infrastructure have heightened the need for smart structural components and systems whose behavior and performance can be controlled under a variety of loading scenarios such as high winds and earthquakes. However, due to the sheer size, scale and cost of most civil engineering structures, design and testing of such smart structures needs to be conducted using a hybrid cyber-physical approach where the infrastructure system in question, for example a bridge, is studied by coupling a small number of physical components with a numerical model of the rest of the structure. Undoubtedly, the success of such a hybrid approach, especially for dynamic real-time applications, hinges on effective integration of the cyber and physical components of the system. This project provides the essential building blocks and a computational integration platform to enable real-time hybrid testing of civil engineering structures. Design and development of physical components, multi-level numerical models, and real-time control algorithms will be conducted at Purdue University. Washington University will provide an adaptive, configurable concurrency platform and communication mechanisms that meet the strict scheduling constraints of real-time cyber-physical systems. The two institutions will collaboratively design a prototype system and conduct extensive testing to validate the integration of the various components and evaluate system performance. Specifications, software, benchmarks, and data developed during the course of this project will be made freely available to the cyber-physical research community. In addition to directly advancing the state-of-the-art in real-time hybrid testing, this research will also impact the areas of avionics, automotive design, smart grids for distributed power transmission and similar applications in other domains.

This NSF grant supports the First PI Meeting and Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), held at the Westin Arlington Gateway hotel, in Arlington, VA on Aug 10-12, 2010. The purpose of this meeting is to provide a forum for scientific interaction among a wide range of stakeholders in academia, industry and federal agencies; to review new developments in CPS foundations; to identify new, emerging applications; and to discuss technology gaps and barriers. The program of the meeting includes presentations from projects funded by NSF under the Cyber-Physical Systems program, government and industry panels, and topical discussion groups.

This award supports the first Summer School on Cyber-Physical Systems, held at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, June 22-25, 2009. NSF funds support outreach and enable the participation of US graduate students and early career faculty in this international event. Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are systems that rely on a tight integration of computation, communication, and controls, for their operation and interaction with the physical environment in which they are deployed. Such systems must be able to operate safely, dependably, securely, efficiently and in real-time, in potentially highly uncertain or unstructured environments. CPS are expected to have great technical, economic and societal impacts in the near future. The objective of the Georgia Tech Summer School on Cyber-Physical Systems is to establish a forum for intellectual exchange on CPS science and technology for researchers from industry and academia. The format of the Summer School is a five-day meeting, organized around the different aspects of Cyber Physical Systems. The topical areas covered include: formal methods, distributed embedded systems, networked control systems, embedded software, scheduling, platforms, and applications.

This project will construct a wireless network of animal-borne embedded devices that will be deployed and tested in a biologically-relevant application. The networked devices will provide not only geo-location data, but also execute cooperative strategies that save battery-life by selectively recording bandwidth-intensive audio and high-definition video footage of occurrences of animal group behavior of interest, such as predation. This project comprises three concurrent and interdependent research themes. The first is the investigation of methods to design and analyze the performance of distributed algorithms that implement autonomous decisions at the mobile agents, subject to communication and computational constraints. The second will pursue data-driven fundamental research on the modeling of animal group motion and will promote a formal understanding of the mechanisms of social interaction. The third is centered on the investigation of methods for hardware integration to build distributed networks of embedded devices that are capable of executing the newly developed algorithms, subject to power and weight constraints. The results and experience gained in this project will guide the development of effective autonomous systems for the monitoring and protection of endangered species. This project will create undergraduate and graduate research opportunities at all participating institutions, expanding on an existing collaboration between the University of Maryland, Princeton University, and the National Geographic Society. There is the potential for using wide-reaching media resources to disseminate the results of this project to a broad audience. This may contribute to attracting more students to engineering and science.

The focus of this project is the efficient implementation of multiple control and non-control automotive applications in a distributed embedded system (DES) with a goal of developing safe, dependable, and secure Automotive CPS. DES are highly attractive due to the fact that they radically enhance the capabilities of the underlying system by linking a range of devices and sensors and allowing information to be processed in unprecedented ways. Deploying control and non-control applications on a modern DES, which uses advanced processor and communication technology, introduces a host of challenges in their analysis and synthesis, and leads to a large semantic gap between models and their implementation. This gap will be filled via the development of a novel CPS architecture by stitching together common fundamental principles of multimodality from real-time systems and related notions of switching in control theory and integrating them into a co-design of real-time platforms and adaptive controllers. This architecture will be validated at the Toyota Technical Center in the context of engine control and diagnostics. The results of this project will provide the science and technology for a foundation in any and all infrastructure systems ranging from finance and energy to telecommunication and transportation where distributed embedded systems are present. In addition to training the graduate and undergraduate students, and mentoring a post-doctoral associate who will gain multi-domain expertise in advanced control, real-time computation and communication, and performance analysis, an inter-school graduate and an integrated summer course will be developed on control in embedded systems and combined with on-going outreach programs at MIT and UPenn for minority and women undergraduate students and K-12 students.