cyber-physical systems
Traditionally, the problems in
cyber systems and physical systems were largely isolated and
investigated by researchers from different research domains. The
research on Cyber-Physical System (CPS) emphasizes the integration
of computing with physical processes. This has greatly broadened the
research scope of the traditional network and embedded system
design. By incorporating the novel technology in network and
embedded system design, this will also potentially bring tremendous
improvement for new and traditional physical systems and
applications. For the automobile system, which used to be
predominately a physical system, when tens if not hundreds
processors located in one single car and more than averagely 90% new
innovations coming from its electronic systems, the integrated study
of cyber and physical system will no doubt become more and more
critical to ensure its safety, security, reliability, and energy
efficiency.
To study the physical system as an entirety is challenging as it
usually demands knowledge and expert skills crossing multiple (i.e.
mechanical, thermal, chemical, and electrical) disciplines. The
barriers between the cyber space and physical space would further
add another level of challenges in the integrated study of CPS. Our
approach to overcome these barriers is to develop a simulation
environment that can encapsulate and capture cyber and physical
characteristics of the systems in one unified framework. This
environment is developed based on an existing multidisciplinary
simulation platform, the Virtual Test Bed (VTB) (http://vtb.engr.sc.edu).
VTB is a multi-formalism and multi-physics platform developed at the
University of South Carolina in the last ten years with the support
of the Office of Naval Research (ONR). VTB uses the resistive
companion model (RCM) to model different physical phenomenon from
different disciplines, thereby allowing simulation and virtual
prototyping of complex multidisciplinary systems in an integrated
environment.
We are developing a simulation platform, based on current version of
VTB, that can simulate the cyber sub-system and physical sub-system
in a coordinated and unified way (as see in Figure 2). The primary
purpose of current VTB is to simulate physical system with
phenomenon crossing different disciplines. We intend to expand the
scope of current VTB by developing appropriate cyber space models
such as those for processors, memory/storage, software, network, and
operating systems as well as building corresponding simulation
kernel and other facilitates to enable the simulation of cyber and
physical systems in an integrated environment.
Figure 1 The VTB for Cyber-Physical System Co-simulation