Engineering cyber-physical systems: a strategic outlook
Pieter J. Mosterman
Abstract
Times are exciting for those in the engineering
profession. Over the past several decades, computation has established
itself as a viable technology to implement system functionality. At
the same time, the exponential increase in computing power has
provided us opportunities galore to conceive of otherwise unrealistic
capabilities. So far the promise, but can we make good on it? Indeed,
the divergence between what can be computed and what can be designed
has proven to be a significant challenge. To exploit the abundantly
available computation, the level of abstraction in design must be
raised and systematic but tedious tasks need to be automated. Where
automatic code generation has made great strides for Von Neumann
architectures, it is far from clear how to scale the concurrency, and,
moreover, the heterogeneity of emerging hardware. This heterogeneous
nature, in turn, is essential in order to keep pace with Moore's Law
now that further miniaturization is failing in the face of power
constraints. Another driver towards heterogeneous platforms is the
increasing demand for networked mobile and stealth devices that need
to be optimized for low power. New design paradigms are indispensable
to exploit the concurrency and heterogeneity and to tailor to the
ubiquitous network of cyber-physical systems that have emerged as a
reality in systems of systems, in particular those that exploit
networked actuation and manipulation. The advances in networked
control may then provide a stop-gap to increasingly migrate decision
logic locally and achieve the reality of truly autonomous machines
that is still the future. Still. In this presentation, key super
trends in engineering systems are recognized. Methodologies and
technologies are identified that must be further developed to
capitalize on these trends in a number of application domains.
Since Berthold Brecht's persuasion is not universally recognized,
there is no pdf version of this presentation available online.