Cyber-Physical Systems Education Research Articles

Explorations in cyber-physical systems education

Explorations in CPS education and related research projects over the past two decades unveil where CPS learning is headed.

A Graduate Curriculum in Cyber-Physical Systems

Editor’s notes: A group of academicians from the University of Virginia has developed a graduate curriculum for cyber-physical systems education. The curriculum follows the National Academy of Engineering report on the need for such content consisting of multidisciplinary classes and professional development skills. — Mohammad Abdullah Al Faruque, University of California Irvine

Cyber-physical systems research and education in 2030: Scenarios and strategies

Future cyber-physical systems (CPS), such as smart cities, collaborative robots, autonomous vehicles or intelligent transport systems, are expected to be highly intelligent, electrified, and connected. This study explores a focal question about how these new characteristics may affect the education and research related to CPS in 2030, the date identified by the United Nations to achieve the Agenda for Sustainable Development. To this end, first, we have conducted a trend spotting activity, seeking to identify possible influencing factors that may have a great impact on the future of CPS education and research.These factors were clustered in a total of 12 trends – four certainties; namely connectivity, electrification, data and automation – and eight uncertainties; namely intelligence, data ethics, labour market, lifelong learning, higher education, trust in technology, technological development speed, and sustainable development goals.After that, two of the eight uncertainties are identified and used to construct a scenario matrix, which includes four scenarios. These two uncertainties – the so-called strategic uncertainties – are: fulfilment of sustainable development goals and the nature of the technological development, respectively. These two important uncertainties are considered to build the scenarios due to their potential impact on the research and education of CPS. For instance, sustainable development goals are significant targets for many initiatives, organisations and countries. While 2030 is the deadline to achieve these goals, the relationship between the sustainable development goals related to CPS research and education is not studied well. Similarly, the speed of technological development is seen as a driving force behind future CPS. However, the effect of this speed to CPS research and education environment is not known.Different outcomes of the chosen two uncertainties are, then, combined with the remaining trends and uncertainties. Consequently, four scenarios are derived. The Terminator scenario illustrates a dystopian future where profit is the driving force behind technological progress and sustainable development goals are not accomplished. In contrast, The Iron Giant scenario represents the successful implementation of the sustainable development goals where technological development is the force behind the accomplishment of these goals. The scenario called Slow Progress represents a future where gradual technological improvements are present, but sustainability is still not seen as concerning the issue. The Humanist scenario illustrates a future where slow technological development is happening yet sustainable development goals are successfully implemented.Finally, the scenarios are used to initiate discussions by illustrating what the future of research and education could look like and a list of strategies for future CPS research and education environments is proposed. To this end, we invite educators, researchers, institutions and governments to develop the necessary strategies to enable data-orientated, continuous, interdisciplinary, collaborative, ethical, and sustainable research and education by improving digital fluency, advancing digital equality, contributing to new ways of teaching complex thinking, expanding access to learning platforms and preparing next generations to adapt for a rapidly changing future of work conditions.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Education for Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are integrations of physical systems with computations. Their design poses many challenges. For example, CPS design is interdisciplinary by nature, crossing the boundaries of many engineering disciplines. In addition, there is a potential mismatch between the discrete nature of today’s computing systems and typically continuous physical systems, and CPS design has to meet and adhere to many constraints and take many objectives into account. As a result, education for the CPS design is quite challenging. In this context, the special issue on education for CPS aims to provide educators, industrial representatives, and researchers with a view on the needs and share solutions for embedded and CPS education. The special issue addresses questions such as “How can we ensure that students will be able to work in interdisciplinary teams?,” “What skills and capabilities are required by the engineers of tomorrow?,” “How should the corresponding educational programs be formed?,” and “How can effective pedagogic methods be introduced in this domain?”

From the EIC: Education for Cyber-Physical Systems

<fig id="fig1" orientation="portrait" position="float" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <graphic orientation="portrait" position="float" xlink:href="henke-3037270.tif"/> </fig> <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">This is the</b> first special issue (SI) in the 37-year history of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">IEEE Design&amp;Test (D&amp;T)</i> that focuses on education. While research remains the focus, educating young talent with new curricula is the key for future world-class research. When I discussed the idea with the guest editors we were all very enthusiastic about the novelty of an education focused SI in <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">D&amp;T</i> . And indeed, what the guest editors present us here is a very unique SI describing the landscape of cyber–physical systems (CPSs) education and curricula around the world. I am sure the ideas presented here will inspire educators around the world. The guest editors have selected six papers from top educators who are also excellent researchers. Besides, the guest editor team also provides a survey on CPS education.

A Programmable Open Architecture Testbed for CPS Education

This contribution introduces the notion of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) and presents the questions which the corresponding Special Issue on CPS Education is trying to answer. For this special issue, it provides an overview of the article selection process and the finally selected papers. -Peter Marwedel, TU Dortmund.

A 21st Century Cyber-Physical Systems Education

The rapid rate of change in the computing and engineering domains has our educational institutions on high alert. The authors explore how best to prepare graduates for a world in which cyber-physical systems are increasingly ubiquitous.

Evolution in the Education of Software Engineers: Online Course on Cyberphysical Systems with Remote Access to Robotic Devices

The objective of this work is to address, from the educational perspective, the trends in the software engineerring discipline, which rely on a significant increase in the use of remotely accessible and remotely controlled embedded devices. The paper presents an approach and experiences with introducing robotic devices accessible online to a course on Cyberphysical Systems in an undergraduate Software Engineering program. A closer look at both technologies, online labs and cyberphysical systems education, reveals that they are not in sync. Remote labs have embraced a wide variety of science and engineering disciplines, but they are not popular in software engineering. On the other hand, software engineering education, being crucial to the development of cyberphysical systems has not focused on such systems by any measure. This project and paper aim at addressing this gap.

Robust online monitoring of signal temporal logic

Signal temporal logic (STL) is a formalism used to rigorously specify requirements of cyberphysical systems (CPS), i.e., systems mixing digital or discrete components in interaction with a continuous environment or analog components. STL is naturally equipped with a quantitative semantics which can be used for various purposes: from assessing the robustness of a specification to guiding searches over the input and parameter space with the goal of falsifying the given property over system behaviors. Algorithms have been proposed and implemented for offline computation of such quantitative semantics, but only few methods exist for an online setting, where one would want to monitor the satisfaction of a formula during simulation. In this paper, we formalize a semantics for robust online monitoring of partial traces, i.e., traces for which there might not be enough data to decide the Boolean satisfaction (and to compute its quantitative counterpart). We propose an efficient algorithm to compute it and demonstrate its usage on two large scale real-world case studies coming from the automotive domain and from CPS education in a Massively Open Online Course setting. We show that savings in computationally expensive simulations far outweigh any overheads incurred by an online approach.

Strategies and considerations in shaping cyber-physical systems education

Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems education faces several challenges as well as opportunities as every-"thing" becomes connected, and as technology development accelerates. Initiatives such as CDIO, as well as several other academic and industry initiatives to create new CPS programs illustrate strong interests and awareness of these challenges. We provide an overview of foreseen educational needs, existing state of the art in education and an analysis of the subject of CPS with the purpose of understanding the implications for education. The investigation points to key issues in curriculum design regarding balancing depth and breadth, theory and practices, academic and industrial needs, and core technical skills with complementary skills. Curricula in CPS could, if the right balance is achieved, educate CPS engineers of the future that are "ready to engineer". We conclude by synthesizing high level guidelines in terms of strategies and considerations for CPS curriculum development.

Towards cyber-physical system technologies over Apache VCL

The paper presents an extension of the Apache virtual computing lab (VCL) facilitating the education of cloud technologies and cyber-physical systems (CPSs). On the one hand, a 'cloud on cloud' solution serves as a teaching platform for IT professionals and cloud application designers. On the other hand, introducing remote access to physical devices as part of virtual lab sessions conducted through VCL supports CPS education. CPS-enabled academic clouds and teaching CPS with academic clouds are both effectively uncharted territories from the didactic point of view - thus we also present an analysis of their potential from the aspect of learning facilitation.