Abstract: Most future CPS systems will represent a complex, messy mix of hardware, software and human interactions – and may produce dangerous instabilities quicker than some external controller can react. The specific focus and motivation of this project concerns modeling and understanding the dynamics of such CPS that are large and evolve in a decentralized way due to changing market conditions, yielding a system comprising many heterogeneous components that may have incompatible communication protocols (e.g.

Inexpensive computation and ubiquitous embedded sensing, actuation, and communication provide tremendous opportunities for societal impact, but also great challenges in the design of networked control systems, because the traditional unity feedback loop that operates in continuous time or at a fixed sampling rate is not adequate when sensor data arrives from multiple sources, asynchronously, delayed, possibly corrupted, and — especially important for this project — the different entities that participate in the control system do not share a common clock.

An effective way for manufacturers to tackle and outpace the increasing complexity of product designs and ever-shortening product lifecycles is to effectively develop and assist the workforce. Yet the current management of manufacturing workforce systems relies mostly on the traditional methods of data collection and modeling, such as subjective observations and after-the-fact statistics of workforce performance, which has reached a bottleneck in effectiveness.