With the increasing popularity of mobile computing, cyber physical systems are merging into major mobile systems of our society, such as public transportation, supply chain systems, and taxi networks. Researchers have accumulated abundant knowledge for designing cyber physical systems, such as military surveillance, infrastructure protection, scientific exploration, and smart environments, mostly in relatively stationary settings, i.e., where spatial diversity is limited.
Body sensor networks (BSN) are emerging cyber-physical systems that promise to improve the quality of life through improved health, augmented sensing and actuation for the disabled, independent living for the elderly, and reduced healthcare costs. However, the physical nature of BSNs introduces several new challenges. The human body, especially in the context of medical conditions, is a highly dynamic and unpredictable physical environment that creates constantly changing demands on sensing, actuation, and quality of service (QoS).
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.
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.
Recent years have seen medical devices go from being monolithic to a collection of integrated systems. Modern medical device systems have thus become a distinct class of cyber-physical systems called Medical Cyber Physical Systems (MCPS), featuring complex and close interaction of sophisticated treatment algorithms with the physical aspects of the system, and especially the patient whose safety is of the utmost concern. The goal of this project is to develop a new paradigm for the design and implementation of safe, secure, and reliable MCPS, which includes:
Control networks are wireless substrates for industrial automation control, such as the WirelessHART and ISA100.11.a, and have fundamental differences over their sensor network counterparts as they also include actuation and the physical dynamics. Consequently, these system are fundamentally constrained by the tight coupling, and closed-loop control and actuation of physical processes.
Fault tolerance is vital to ensuring the integrity and availability of safety critical systems. Current solutions are based almost exclusively on physical redundancy at all levels of the design. The use of physical redundancy, however, dramatically increases system size, complexity, weight, and power consumption.
This project focuses on the formal design of semi-autonomous automotive Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). Rather than disconnecting the driver from the vehicle, the goal is to obtain a vehicle where the degree of autonomy is continuously changed in real-time as a function of certified uncertainty ranges in driver behavior and environment reconstruction.
Functional electrical stimulation (FES) is a promising technology for activating muscles in spinal cord injured (SCI) patients. The objective of our project is to develop an intuitive user interface and control system that allows high--level tetraplegic patients to regain the use of their own arm.
