An important area of cyber-physical systems research is the development of smart ground transportation systems due to their potentially significant impact on safety, the economy, and the environment. While technologies for smart transportation systems have advanced significantly over the last decade, there remain several challenges for the development of transportation systems that are collision free.
The objective of this research is an injection of new modeling techniques into the area of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs). The approach is to design new architectures for domain- specific modeling tools in order to permit feedback from analysis, validation, and verification engines to influence how CPSs are designed. This project outlines new research into the integration of existing, heterogeneous modeling languages in order to address problems in CPS design, rather than a single language used to design any CPS.
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.
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.
Our overarching goal is to develop a framework for design automation of cyber-physical systems that augment human-in-the-loop inference and interaction by complex systems operating at the interface of computation and physical environment.
