Martin Fränzle (Oldenburg)

21.01.2016 - W01 0-012 (Wechloy), 16 Uhr c.t.

Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems are characterized by, first and foremost, featuring a tight interaction between their computational and physical components, but add aspects of networking, distributed control, mobility, autonomy, cooperation, integration with IT-services ("internet of things"), and human-machine interaction to this. Bringing all kinds of physical processes, even geographically or otherwise remote ones, into the sphere of our control, cyber-physical systems transfer the familiar ease of interfacing with the virtual world to the physical world and will thus fundamentally change the way we interact with our environment. Interacting via traditional human-computer interfaces, e.g. through smartphone GUIs, and substituting classical controls, e.g. in remotely controlling household appliances, are just the small beginnings; future applications will inevitably offer more diverse, direct, and partially subconscious user interfaces, they will extend the sphere of control from isolated facets and clearly localized physical items to global networking, and they will rapidly grow in criticality, inducing a societal dependency on continued availability and correct function of the systems. While they do provide a natural next step in an evolution from embedded systems over hybrid systems to a world seamlessly integrating physical and virtual entities with each other and with human cognition, cyber-physical systems thus confront system design and analysis with new challenges: missions and system boundaries will be less well-defined in advance, emergent behavior within dynamically forming, unforeseen cooperative group becomes the rule, and long-term autonomy facilitating systems to survive in an unattended and unsupervised manner for orders of magnitude longer than usual inter-maintenance intervals proves useful. Cyber-physical systems therefore call for an integration of various models and analysis techniques we have investigated in the past, as these cover relevant, yet hitherto isolated aspects of the dynamics exhibited by cyber-physical systems.

The talk will explain emerging cyber-physical systems in domains ranging from transportation to supplies, identify their requirements with respect to safety, security, reliability, and the interaction of the geometric perspective with these. It will then demonstrate automated analysis techniques for some of these aspects and will explore the scenarios they are able to cover as well as identify their limitations.