Applications of CPS technologies used in the planning, functional design, operation and management of facilities for any mode of transportation in order to provide for the safe, efficient, rapid, comfortable, convenient, economical, and environmentally compatible movement of people and goods.
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.
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.
Transforming the traditional, single-vehicle-based safety and efficiency control, next-generation vehicles are expected to form platoons for optimizing roadway usage and fuel efficiency while ensuring transportation safety. Two basic enablers of vehicle platooning are vehicular wireless networking and platoon control.
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are deployed in a wide variety of safety critical applications from avionics, medical, and automotive domains. For these applications, it is essential to create a precise specification and formally verify that the implementation behaves as specified. The formal verification of these systems presents a wide variety of challenges. Models of these systems must represent the physical world, analog sensors and actuators, computer hardware and software, networks, and feedback control.
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.
The National Science Foundation will hold the 2014 National Workshop on Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems January 23-24, 2014 at the Waterview Conference Center located at 1919 N. Lynn Street in Arlington, Virginia. The workshop will bring together leaders from industry, research laboratories, academic institutions and government agencies to identify the fundamental issues, and to provide research directions for the development and deployment of next-generation transportation cyber-physical systems.
Multicore platforms have the potential of revolutionizing the capabilities of embedded cyber-physical systems but lack predictability in execution time due to shared resources. Safety-critical systems require such predictability for certification. This research aims at resolving this multicore "predictability problem.'' It will develop methods that enable to share hardware resources to be allocated and provide predictability, including support for real-time operating systems, middleware, and associated analysis tools.
