Abstract: Medical devices are typically developed as stand-alone units. Current industrial Verification and Validation (V&V) tech- niques primarily target stand-alone systems. Moreover, the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) regulatory clearance processes are designed to approve such devices that are integrated by a single manufacturer with complete control over all components.

Abstract: Effective engineering of complex devices often depends on the ability to encapsulate responsibility for tasks into modular components with specific responsibilities and clearly defined lines of communication. Under such conditions, one can determine what components or lines of communication are at fault for poor system performance because the system can be checked against modularized model specifications.

Abstract: This grant provides funding for establishing the scientific foundations of a product innovation process that can engage a vastly larger pool of talent to generate new ideas and to create new cyber-physical products. The primary objective is to address fundamental issues pertaining to natural interfaces, behavioral modeling and secure knowledge sharing, with particular emphasis on their integration.

Abstract: Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs) integrate physical devices (e.g., sensors, cameras) with cyber components to form a situation-aware analytical system. The overall research objective of the project is to reveal cross-cutting fundamental scientific and engineering principles that underpin the integration of cyber and physical elements across all application sectors. Here we provide an overview of our recent research achievements:

Abstract: Despite their importance within the energy sector, buildings have not kept pace with technological improvements and particularly  the evolution of intelligent features. A primary obstacle  in enabling intelligent buildings is their highly distributed and diverse nature.

Abstract: A hybrid system is a dynamical model that describes the coupled evolution of both continuous‐ valued variables and discrete patterns. A prime example of such a system is a power electronic circuit, where the semiconductor transistors behave as ideal switches whose switching actions effectively change the circuit topology (i.e., the discrete pattern) that in turn defines the dynamics of currents and voltages (i.e., the continuous variables) and hence the switching actions.

Abstract: When mechanical linkages are replaced by electronic communication and control systems, certain undesirable phenomena can arise that may be difficult to anticipate. In simple cases the lack of dissipativity in the cyber link unmasks instabilities that were present but suppressed in the system with a mechanical (physical) link. In more complex cases, there may be no simple physical equivalent to the system containing the cyber link, and a damping coefficient or dissipative element may not be identifiable.

Abstract: Current methods for design and verification of cyber-physical systems (CPS) lack a unifying framework due to the complexity and heterogeneity of the constituent elements and their interactions. Heterogeneous models describe different aspects of a CPS at varying levels of abstraction and using different formal languages. This prevents engineers from detecting inconsistencies among models and reasoning at the system level to verify specifications at design time.