What Training is Needed by Practicing Engineers Who Create Cyberphysical Systems?

Abstract

The creation of cyber physical systems requires not only the effective education of future engineers in the classroom, but also ongoing training to support life-long learning by practicing engineers, who will continuously face new technologies and challenges. But what topics exactly should this training cover? To answer this question, an analysis was conducted of an online forum used by programmers who create cyber physical systems with the Lab VIEW development environment. This examination of over 150,000 forum message threads has highlighted crucial gaps in the training of practicing engineers, especially in the areas of hardware-software integration, as well as the design and implementation of user interfaces and algorithms. A complementary review of the available online training materials relevant to these topics reveals the need for more systematic support for learning by practicing system engineers. These results provide empirical support for ongoing efforts to provide more effective education of current and future engineers of cyber physical systems, including through reuse of third-party code and other resources to support learning.