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Background

Foundations for Innovation in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS)

Purpose: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is sponsoring a workshop on March 13-14, 2012 in Chicago, Illinois to identify crosscutting technical barriers and knowledge gaps limiting innovation and U.S. competitiveness in cyber-physical systems (CPS).  Particular attention will be given to current and future technology and measurement capabilities that can fill in these knowledge gaps.  The resulting workshop report will be used to inform strategic planning efforts at NIST and provide planning information to other government agencies, customers, and stakeholders with a vital interest in the future of CPS technologies.

Scope: Cyber-physical systems—smart systems that have cyber technologies, both hardware and software, deeply embedded in and interacting with physical components, and sensing and changing the state of the real world—must operate with high levels of reliability, safety, security, and usability.  A PCAST 2007 report¹ recommended that Federal R&D agencies strengthen existing programs or create new, cross-disciplinary ones programs to accelerate work in this area.  A December 2010 PCAST report² expanded this recommendation to include a focus on energy, transportation, health care, and homeland security.  The Office of Science and Technology Policy and Office of Management and Budget have also called for focused support of R&D in advanced manufacturing to “strengthen U.S. leadership in the areas of robotics, cyber-physical systems, and flexible manufacturing” as a means to promote sustainable economic growth and job creation.³  These recommendations all arise from an accelerated demand for new capabilities and cyber-physical applications such as the smart grid, the next generation air transportation system, intelligent transportation systems, smart medical technologies, smart buildings, and smart manufacturing. Indeed, CPS has a growing importance to the economic future of the country and to national and homeland security.  While rapid progress is being made in CPS across many sectors, there are a number of technical challenges that must be addressed to meet increasing demand for these innovative technologies.

Some areas of opportunity include:

• Energy and Utilities – Systems for more efficient, effective, safe and secure generation, transmission, and distribution of electric power, integrated through the smart grid; smart systems applied to water and pipeline systems
• Manufacturing – Smarter, more connected processes for agile and efficient production; manufacturing robotics that work safely with people in shared spaces; computer directed metal-based additive manufacturing
• Transportation and Mobility – Vehicle-to-vehicle communications for enhanced safety and convenience (“zero fatality” highways), drive-by-wire, autonomous vehicles; next generation air transportation system (NextGen); autonomous vehicles for off-road and military mobility applications   
• Medical Care and Health – Life-supporting micro-devices, embedded in the human body; wireless connectivity enabling body area sensor nets; mass customization of heterogeneous, configurable personalized medical devices, and natural, wearable sensors (clothing, jewelry) and benignly implantable devices
• Buildings and Infrastructure – Smart (“net-zero energy”) buildings for energy savings, actively monitored, controlled and optimized buildings, bridges, dams, and other structures
• National and Homeland Security – next generation networked weapons systems and autonomous vehicles (air, land, naval surface and underwater); sensor networks for monitoring and response

The U.S. is the global leader in cyber technologies and is well-positioned to gain a competitive advantage in CPS that will enhance U.S. economic security and enable resurgence of U.S. manufacturing production and exports; disruptive product innovations; and creation/retention of U.S. manufacturing jobs.  The opportunity is to gain competitive leadership through the ability to develop new cyber-physical systems with built-in assurance of their critical properties, including safety and security, and correct, timely performance of their intended functions.

This workshop will examine the technical barriers limiting innovation and competitiveness in cyber-physical systems.  The goal of the workshop is to identify potential crosscutting technical barriers, and describe the knowledge gaps that complicate solutions. A special focus will be on identifying current and future technology and measurement capabilities that can fill in these knowledge gaps. Experts from around the globe will be invited to consider the current state of technology and the critical challenges facing CPS in the future. Breakout sessions will be used to discuss these challenges and identify the most promising paths to solutions. The resulting report from this workshop is expected to guide the developments that enable acceleration in the pace of CPS technology.

Workshop Topics (straw):

The challenges and needs in the following CPS research areas will be considered and discussed:

• Reliable, safe, and secure systems you can trust your life with. What is needed to cost effectively and rapidly build in and assure safety, dependability, security, and performance of next-generation cyber-physical systems? How can they become fault tolerant and adaptive? How can they be efficiently upgraded and recertified?
• Networked, cooperating, human-interactive systems. What is needed to enable streamlined and predictable development, deployment, and evolution of networked and integrated cyber-physical systems, particularly as systems become interconnected with legacy systems and across industry boundaries? How do we effectively achieve compositionality within heterogeneous, dissimilar but connected systems? How can the role of humans be modeled and integrated in systems with variable levels of autonomy?
• Engineering across the digital-physical divide. What is needed for multi-scale, multi-physics models and abstractions to enable co-design of software, communications, and interacting physical subsystems? How do we enable consideration of a wide range of design trade-offs across digital and physical systems? What engineering foundations and tools are needed to support CPS throughout the entire system lifecycle?
• Architecture and platforms for cyber-physical systems. What is needed to enable development and application of comprehensive architectural frameworks that include both the physical and cyber elements of CPS? What new platforms are needed to effectively extract actionable information from vast amounts of raw data? What is needed to provide a robust timing and systems framework to support the real-time control and synchronization requirements of complex, networked, engineered physical systems? What advances are needed in sensing, control, and wireless communications to enable optimized performance, diagnostics, and prognostics?
• Education, workforce training, and technology transition. What is needed to ensure that higher education provides a new generation of scientists and engineers qualified to develop, design, and implement an array of cyber-physical systems? What is needed to create a skilled workforce capable of operating and maintaining the highly complex CPS of the future? What are effective mechanisms for transitioning new CPS technology to suppliers and end-users?

Output:  A summary of workshop results, plus a strategic recommendations or opportunities document outlining the proposed technology and measurement challenges for cyber-physical systems, as well as the context in which they exist (e.g. relevant business, policy, regulatory, and other pertinent questions or challenges).

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