Design of Cyber-physical Systems - Methodologies for HW/SW Co-design

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Future cyber-physical systems will host a large number of co-existing distributed applications on hardware platforms with thousands to millions of networked components communicating over open networks. Applications and network are subject to continuous change. In such systems, the current separation of design process and operation in the field will be replaced by a life-time design process of adaptation, in field integration, and update.  Continuous change and evolution, application interference, environment dynamics and uncertainty lead to complex effects which must be controlled to serve a growing set of platform and application needs. The current engineering process which is largely based on tool-supported human creativity will no more suffice, simply because the number of adaptation and evolutions processes will exceed the number of engineers by several orders of magnitude. What is needed is a fundamental change of the design process from a tool supported to an increasingly autonomous design process. Autonomic computing, as developed for large IT networks, is an example for such an approach. But cyber-physical systems design is far more complex including physical design with mechanical components, and various constraints including safety and power consumption with their individual design methods and legal regulations. Self-adaptation based on application and platform self-configuration and self-awareness have been proposed as a basis for such a design process. Research is needed to develop automated in-field design steps with the required safety, availability, and security guarantees. Systems design research should identify suitable robust hardware and software architectures and supply clear bounds what parts of system design can be automated and what part must stay in the lab. A Research Group at TU Braunschweig involving 8 faculty is currently working on these research issues with applications in automotive and aerospace vehicle design.
 

About the panel speaker:

Rolf Ernst  is a professor at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany. He received a BSc, MSc in CS and a Ph.D. in EE from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. After 2 years at Bell Labs in Allentown, PA, he joined TU Braunschweig in 1990 where he chairs the Institute of Computer and Network Engineering (IDA) covering embedded systems research from computer architecture and real-time systems theory to challenging automotive, aerospace, or smart building applications. His research is or was funded by national and European programs as well as by companies, such as BMW, Bosch, Daimler, Ford, GM, Toyota, Volkswagen, Intel, Siemens, or Thales.  He chaired major scientific events, such as ICCAD, DATE, or ESWEEK. He was a member of the European ARTEMIS Strategic Research Agenda team and served as an expert for the successor program ECSEL as well as for H2020. He is an IEEE Fellow, a DATE Fellow, served as an ACM SIGDA Distinguished Lecturer, and is a member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering, acatech. He is a member of the advisory board (Beirat) of the German Ministry of Economics and Technology for entrepreneurship programs (www.exist.de). In 2014, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the European Design Automation Association, EDAA.