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.

The objective of this research is considering security and timing as primary concerns, re-envisioning computer architecture and network algorithms to provide a robust foundation for CPS. The approach is rethinking the hardware and software divide, providing true process concurrency and isolation. Extending these benefits to the communication network so integral to CPS, multicast and security innovations that consider CPS constraints will be proposed. This project will provide computational and communication foundations for CPS through the following tasks. (1) An open source hardware design will be created. Abandoning the error-prone paradigm of shared memory communication, Precision Timed (PRET) processors for dataflow computations will be extended. (2) The hardware/software interface will be investigated specifically for PRET architectures. (3) A routing algorithm considering the CPS constraints will be investigated. The constraints include efficiency, adaptability, scalability, simplicity, and security. (4) Distributed Source Coding for CPS applications will be studied with focus on challenges from small packet sizes in these applications. This project will engage the community and students in multiple grades and institutions, through the following undertakings. (1) A package for education and research in CPS will be assembled. This package and the material from this project in the form of tutorials, publications, and curriculum will be available to other institutions. (2) New courses will be created integrating research results into education. (3) A diverse group of students including women and minorities will be recruited. (4) Two applications will be implemented in the fields of medical devices and emergency response.

The objective of this research is to define programming abstractions with temporal semantics for distributed cyber-physical systems. The approach is to create a coordination language for distributed embedded software that blends naturally with models of physical dynamics. The coordination language is based on a rigorous discrete-event concurrent model of computation. It will be used by system designers to construct models from which software implementations are derived. The objective is distributed software that, if it compiles for a platform, delivers precisely the temporal semantics specified in the model. Intellectual merit: This project addresses the core abstractions of computing, which throughout the 20th century, have abstracted away time, and of physical dynamics, which have omitted software and network behaviors. For cyber-physical systems, both are inappropriate. This project is developing new time-centric abstractions for software, programming models, analysis techniques, and integration of software and network models with physical dynamics. Broader impacts: Besides the considerable economic and societal impact of CPS in general, the project is expected to have considerable impact on engineering and computer science education. Its focus on engineering applications and on sound computer science methods will erode the boundaries between these disciplines that hamper competitiveness of our students. A new generation of students is needed to dramatically improve our energy efficiency, manufacturing capabilities, transportation efficiency, instrumentation prowess (and hence, scientific knowledge), and infrastructure robustness. Because of the broad societal implications of the work, it will help attract to engineering and computer science a more diverse talent pool.

Using the newly introduced idea of a sensor lattice, this project conducts a systematic study of the "granularity'' at which the world can be sensed and how that affects the ability to accomplish common tasks with cyber-physical systems (CPSs). A sensor is viewed as a device that partitions the physical world states into measurement-invariant equivalence classes, and the sensor lattice indicates how all sensors are related. Several distinctive characteristics of the pursued approach are: 1) Virtual sensor models are developed, which correspond to minimal information requirements of common tasks and are independent of particular physical sensor implementations. 2) Uncertainty is decoupled into disturbances and pre-images, the latter of which yields the measurement-invariant equivalence classes and sensor lattice. 3) The development of particular spatial and temporal filters that are based on minimal information requirements of a task. 4) Formally establishing the conditions that enable sensors in a CPS to be interchanged, and then determining the relative complexity tradeoffs. The intellectual merit is to understand how mappings from the physical world to sensor outputs affect the solvability and complexity of commonly occurring tasks. This is a critical step in the development of mathematical and computational CPS foundations. Broader impact is expected by improving design methodologies for CPS solutions to societal problems such as assisted living, environmental monitoring, and automated agriculture. The sensor lattice approach is transformative because it represents a new paradigm with which to address basic sensor-based inference issues, which extend well beyond the traditional academic boundaries.

The objective of this research is to develop models, methods and tools for capturing and processing of events and actions in cyber-physical systems (CPS) in a manner that does not violate the underlying physics or computational logic. The project approach uses a novel notion of cyber-physical objects (CPO) to capture the mobility and localization of computation in cyber-physical systems using recent advances in geolocation and the Internet infrastructure and supports novel methods for spatiotemporal resource discovery. Project innovations include a model for computing spatiotemporal relationships among events of interests in the physical and logical parts of a CPS, and its use in a novel cyberspatial reference model. Using this model the project builds a framework for locating cyber-physical application services and an operating environment for these services. The project plan includes an experimental platform to demonstrate capabilities for building new OS services for CPS applications including collaborative control applications drawn from the intermodal transportation system. The project will enable design and analysis of societal scale applications such as the transportation and electrical power grid that also include a governance structure. It will directly contribute to educating an engineering talent pool by offering curricular training that range from degree programs in embedded systems to seminars and technology transfer opportunities coordinated through the CalIT2 institute at UCSD and the Institute for Sensing Systems (ISS) at OSU. The team will collaborate with the non-profit Milwaukee Institute to explore policies and mechanisms for enterprise governance systems.

CPS: Small: Collaborative Research: Localization and System Services for SpatioTemporal Actions in Cyber-Physical Systems The objective of this research is to develop models, methods and tools for capturing and processing of events and actions in cyber-physical systems (CPS) in a manner that does not violate the underlying physics or computational logic. The project approach uses a novel notion of cyber-physical objects (CPO) to capture the mobility and localization of computation in cyber-physical systems using recent advances in geolocation and the Internet infrastructure and supports novel methods for spatiotemporal resource discovery. Project innovations include a model for computing spatiotemporal relationships among events of interests in the physical and logical parts of a CPS, and its use in a novel cyberspatial reference model. Using this model the project builds a framework for locating cyber-physical application services and an operating environment for these services. The project plan includes an experimental platform to demonstrate capabilities for building new OS services for CPS applications including collaborative control applications drawn from the intermodal transportation system. The project will enable design and analysis of societal scale applications such as the transportation and electrical power grid that also include a governance structure. It will directly contribute to educating an engineering talent pool by offering curricular training that range from degree programs in embedded systems to seminars and technology transfer opportunities coordinated through the CalIT2 institute at UCSD and the Institute for Sensing Systems (ISS) at OSU. The team will collaborate with the non-profit Milwaukee Institute to explore policies and mechanisms for enterprise governance systems.

The objective of this research is to study the formal design and verification of advanced vehicle dynamics control systems. The approach is to consider the vehicle-driver-road system as a cyber-physical system (CPS) by focusing on three critical components: (i) the tire-road interaction; (ii) the driver-vehicle interaction; and (iii) the controller design and validation. Methods for quantifying and estimating the uncertainty of the road friction coefficient by using self-powered wireless sensors embedded in the tire are developed for considering tire-road interaction. Tools for real-time identification of nominal driver behavior and uncertainty bounds by using in-vehicle cameras and body wireless sensors are developed for considering driver-vehicle interaction. A predictive hybrid supervisory control scheme will guarantee that the vehicle performs safely for all possible uncertainty levels. In particular, for controller design and validation, the CPS autonomy level is continuously adapted as a function of human and environment conditions and their uncertainty bounds quantified by considering tire-road and driver-vehicle interaction. High confidence is critical in all human operated and supervised cyber-physical systems. These include environmental monitoring, telesurgery, power networks, and any transportation CPS. When human and environment uncertainty bounds can be predicted, safety can be robustly guaranteed by a proper controller design and validation. This avoids lengthy and expensive trial and error design procedures and drastically increases their confidence level. Graduate, undergraduate and underrepresented engineering students benefit from this project through classroom instruction, involvement in the research and substantial interaction with industrial partners from the fields of tires, vehicle active safety, and wireless sensors.

The objective of this research is to investigate and develop methods and tools for the analysis and verification of cyber-physical systems. The approach is to augment the methods and tools that have been developed at the University of Utah and the University of South Florida for modeling and verification of asynchronous and analog/mixed-signal circuits to address challenges in cyber-physical system verification. This research will develop a unified framework with methods and tools which include an integrated formalism to comprehensively model discrete/continuous, functional/timing, synchronous/asynchronous, and deterministic/stochastic behavior. These tools will also include algorithms to analyze behavior and verify that it satisfies the correctness requirements on functionality, timing, and robustness. Finally, they will include abstraction and compositional reasoning approaches to enable large systems to be analyzed and verified efficiently. Since cyber-physical systems are becoming ubiquitous, improvements in such systems such as higher reliability, better fault-tolerance, improved performance, and lower design costs will have tremendous positive impact on society. Results from this research will be transferred to the cyber-physical systems community and other application domains by both publishing papers in related conferences and journals as well as by freely distributing tools via the Internet. Both graduate and undergraduate students will be engaged in this multi-institutional research where they will be exposed to the latest research in formal and probabilistic analysis. Early involvement of undergraduate students may help encourage them to attend graduate school. This research project will also recruit underrepresented and female students to allow it to reach broader audiences.