Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

Pervasive computing has progressed significantly with a growth of embedded systems as a result of recent advances in digital electronics, wireless networking, sensors and RFID technology. These embedded systems are capable of producing enormous amount of data that cannot be handled by human brains. At the same time, there is a growing need for integrating these embedded devices into physical environment in order to achieve a far better capability, scalability, resiliency, safety, security and usability in important sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, energy, agriculture, architecture and many more. The confluence of all these recent trends is the vision of distributed cyber-physical systems that will far exceed the performance of traditional embedded systems. Cyber-physical systems are emerging technology that require significant research in design and implementation with a few important challenges to overcome. The goal of this chapter is to present an overview of basic design and architecture of a cyber-physical system along with some specific applications and a brief description of the design process for developers. This chapter also presents a brief discussion of security and privacy issues, the most important challenge of cyber-physical systems.