Research
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