Cyber-Physical Systems: Monitoring, Control, and Optimization

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Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are engineered computing and communicating systems that interface with physical processes/environment. With the explosive growth in computing and networking technology, CPS are found in many modern applications, including wireless process automation, electrical power grids, transportation networks, advanced automotive systems, environmental monitoring, medical appliances, wireless sensor networks, and distributed robotics. In CPS, the system elements such as actuators, sensors, subsystems, and controllers are typically spatially isolated from one another, operating in an asynchronous manner and communicating over a wide area via both wired and wireless links. Such systems present new challenges for control engineers and designers because of the interactions among control, computation, and communication components: (a) How to explore outside computing capability for better system integrity? (b) When to connect different system elements for efficient use of communication resources? (c) When and how to execute distributed control for better global performance? Integrating control specifications, computation capabilities, and communication constraints together in CPS is the objective and thrust in this research. We propose a distributed, event triggered control and communication paradigm for CPS; the research program covers state estimation under communication constraints, event triggered feedback control, event triggered multi-agent systems, and application in wireless automation. The proposed research program would fill in the gap between theory and practice; it would provide control engineers with new tools for analysis and synthesis of CPS; it would benefit a team of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows by engaging in technology- and industry-relevant research training; finally, it would establish and strengthen Canada's leading position in this new and emerging research arena of CPS monitoring and control.