To register for tutorials: http://cpsweek2011.cs.illinois.edu/reg.html

Tutorial listing

• Workload Modeling and Related Issues for Designing Future Cyber-Physical Systems
  • We live in a world were computation, communication, and control are continuously and increasingly interwoven to produce functionally rich and energy efficient cyber-physical systems (CPS). As such, the focus of CPS design is not only to establish a solid and reliable communication infrastructure between such computational elements, but also to include time and feedback-based control as intrinsic components of the programming model; this allows generalizing the computational paradigm such that more direct interaction between the system and physical world becomes possible. It is obvious that such complex requirements call not only for a new science of networks, but also for a multi-disciplinary approach towards CPS design. Indeed, such a new science cannot rely on classical approaches for workload modeling and linear control paradigms. In this tutorial we argue that precise and complex workload characterization should be one of the main drivers in CPS design and optimization. Consequently, we plan to introduce a new framework for workload characterization based on statistical physics and then show how this new paradigm can change the design of future CPS for the better. Towards this end, we plan to discuss various approaches inspired from statistical physics (e.g., master equation, renormalization group theory, fractional derivatives) that can greatly improve CPS modeling and optimization. Indeed, adopting such a theoretical approach has many implications in the design of new control strategies, topology selection and resource allocation, scheduling, routing protocols, and, last but not least, security.
• Arbitrated Networked Control Systems Approach to Cyber-Physical Systems
  • This tutorial will focus on “control/architecture co?design” in settings where multiple control applications are implemented on a distributed architecture. Such architectures will be assumed to consist of multiple processors communicating over a system made up of several buses and gateways implementing different protocols. Such a setting arises specifically in the context of automotive cyber-physical architectures that now consist of 80-100 ECUs (electronic control units) connected through multiple buses, such as FlexRay, CAN and Ethernet. In this tutorial, we will discuss implementations of control applications in distributed architectures. We will quantify the semantic gap between control models and their implementations that occur due to underlying assumptions in the modeling process. We will then illustrate several co-design procedures where the control designs are in sync with the implementation architecture and the architecture design efficiently accommodates all control performance specifications, stability and tracking performance in the transient and steady states. There has been a significant amount of work in the area of networked control systems (NCS), which primarily deal with control applications communicating over wireless networks, where messages suffer loss, delay and jitter. In contrast to such traditional NCS, the cyberphysical systems that we focus on have a distributed architecture where questions related to the arbitration of control tasks (e.g., how to partition and map the control tasks) with a synergistic design of the underlying implementation architecture (e.g., how many ECUs and how are they connected?). The issue of co?design in such settings becomes considerably more important, instead of merely taking into account the properties of the wireless network in designing the control models. Apart from discussing the necessary analysis and synthesis methods for this co-design, we will also present several examples and realistic case studies from the automotive electronics and software domain in this tutorial.
• Dynamic Vehicle Routing for Robotic Systems
  • This tutorial will present a joint algorithmic and queueing approach to the design of cooperative control and task allocation strategies for networks of uninhabited vehicles (UVs). Specifically, we present algorithms for the automatic planning of optimal multi-vehicle routes to perform tasks that are generated over time by an exogenous process. The key novelty is the simultaneous introduction of combinatorial aspects (e.g., task allocation and scheduling) together with stochastic and differential aspects (e.g., queueing effects and differential constraints on vehicles’ dynamics) in the context of distributed coordination of multi-agent networks. The growing demand for complex cyber-physical systems satisfying combinatorial task specifications, operating in uncertain environments, and obeying severe dynamical constraints requires, in fact, a holistic yet rigorous framework for algorithm design. We present recent work on coordination, planning and routing algorithms for the efficient discovery and timely servicing of tasks that are not known a priori. As in queueing theory, task arrivals are modeled as a stochastic process, and queueing-style algorithms are required to enable UVs to search, identify, allocate, prioritize, plan paths, and form teams. The design and analysis of these algorithms typically require a combination of receding-horizon resource allocation, distributed optimization, combinatorics and control. Daily-life applications are numerous and include surveillance and monitoring missions, as well as transportation networks and automated material handling.
• Sensor Management for Tracking
  • Large sensor networks collecting data in dynamic environments are typically composed of a distributed collection of nodes with limited energy and processing capabilities. Hence, it is imperative to efficiently manage the sensors’ resources to prolong the lifetime of such networks without sacrificing performance. This tutorial seeks to address the general problem of joint sensor resource management for tracking applications. The fundamental goal is to dynamically manage and control the sensing assets and modalities in order to efficiently track the objects’ physical information states (e.g., target locations, speeds, types, number) subject to constraints on various resources such as energy, communication, and computation. The tutorial is structured into four major parts. In part I, we introduce the mathematical models for object(s) dynamics, the sensing system (including a description of the sensing modalities) and the observation models. Since sensor management for tracking is essentially a problem of filtering with dynamic sequential decision making under uncertainty, in part II of this tutorial we aim to provide an overview of non-linear filtering and Markov Decision Processes with special emphasis on models where the state is only partially observable to the controllers, due to noise and model uncertainties, natural limitations of the measurement devices, or incomplete data about the surroundings. In Part III, we address various problems in sensor management, including the problems of sensor scheduling, sensor sleep management, and multi-modal control. The goal is to design efficient control policies that yield the best tradeoffs between tracking performance and resource usage. Exact solutions are generally intractable even for the simplest models due to the dimensionality of the information and control spaces. Hence, in part IV of this tutorial, we discuss approximate solution techniques to design control policies ranging from simple myopic policies, through information theoretic approaches, to approximation techniques which use special surrogates to the optimal value function such as the observable-after-control and the point-based type policies.
• Web Portals for Collaborative Cyber-Physical Systems Software Research
  • Consider a researcher or graduate student interested in building new technologies and tools to improve software and systems engineering. While the researchers strive to understand and incorporate deep, specific knowledge about a problem domain, they typically have little to no contact with engineers working real, large software systems programs, making it hard for them to get the information they need. To showcase their research results, researchers thus have little choice but to make up data artifacts using their imagination, and design and conduct experiments that are abstract and typically small-scale representations of the challenges faced by real programs. Now imagine an online portal dedicated to providing researchers with freely available, realistic, at-scale data artifacts, along with experimentation facilities that allow engineers to use the artifacts to reproduce challenges faced by real programs. Imagine also the researchers using the same data artifacts to demonstrate how their specific technology solves a piece of the challenge. Collaboration facilities that allow program engineers and researchers to discuss and refine assumptions, document experimental results for other future researchers, are all free and openly available to all researchers. The vision of such a portal is shared by diverse organizations such as OSD and AFRL, sponsors of the SPRUCE project, and NSF, supporting the CPS-Virtual Organization project (CPS-VO). Both groups are now closely collaborating. The purpose of this tutorial is to educate the research community about these portals, and demonstrate how they can use the challenge problems, data artifacts and experimentation facilities to support their specific research needs. Presenters for this event will be drawn from the execution teams of the DoD SPRUCE and the NSF CPS-VO programs.

Cyber-physical Systems Week
Chicago, USA, April 11 – 14 2011
http://cpsweek2011.cs.illinois.edu/

About CPSWeek

Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) are engineered systems whose operations are monitored, coordinated, controlled, and integrated by a computing and communication core embedded in all types of objects and structures in the physical environment. Such systems must be operated safely, dependably, securely, efficiently and in real-time. Advances in this field will have great technical, economic and societal impacts in the near future. CPSWeek brings together leading researchers in this area by collocating five leading conferences dealing with aspects of CPS. Apart from the conferences, CPSWeek involves exciting workshops and tutorials. CPSWeek attendees can benefit from engaging with other participants from diverse backgrounds but sharing a common goal of building next-generation cyber-physical systems.

May 16 is a hard deadline for paper submissions. Please read the complete CFP for more details.