Cyber–Physical Systems: Close Encounters Between Two Parallel Worlds [Point of View]

TLDR

Technology, science, and engineering have continually expanded physical world capabilities—from rapid transportation and space travel to virtual connectivity via the internet—fueling a growing demand for groundbreaking mobility and interaction across time and space. The paper introduces cyber‑physical systems (CPS) as a new class of systems that embed cyber capabilities into the physical world to transform interactions with humans, infrastructure, and platforms. CPS leverage converging advances in communications, sensing, computing, materials, and renewable fuels to create sensor‑actuated, adaptive systems that couple physical assets with cyber capabilities across scales, while continuously adapting to environmental anomalies and evolving technologies to maintain performance.

Abstract

Technology, science, and engineering continue to redefine physical world capabilities. Take mobility of humans, for example. In the 20th century, transportation systems moved us to unimaginable distances, speeds on earth and made us set foot on the Moon. Star Trek popularized teleportation, a fictitious technology that instantly allows us to "go where no person has gone before." Before end of the century, Internet and wireless networking helped to create the parallel "cyber world," virtually "teleporting" us great distances to interact with remote objects, people, and places. In the new millennium, our restless society's need for such ground-breaking capabilities in time and space has never been greater. Cyber-physical system (CPS) is a promising new class of systems that deeply embed cyber capabilities in the physical world, either on humans, infrastructure or platforms, to transform interactions with the physical world. Advances in the cyber world such as communications, networking, sensing, computing, storage, and control, as well as in the physical world such as materials, hardware, and renewable "green" fuels, are all rapidly converging to realize this class of highly collaborative computational systems that are reliant on sensors and actuators to monitor and effect change.Tomorrow's CPS is expected to enrich cyber-physical interactions by intimately coupling assets and dynamics of the physical and engineered systems with the computing and communications of cyber systems, at grand scales and depths from nanosystems to geographically dispersed systems-of-systems. It must be able to adapt rapidly to anomalies in the environment and embrace the evolution of technologies while still providing critical assertions of performance and other constraints.