Sustainable Cyber-Physical Systems

This Focus Group involves Dieter Schwarz Courageous Research Grant holder Prof. Samarjit Chakraborty (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and his hosts Prof. Andreas Herkersdorf (Chair of Integrated Systems, TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology) and Prof. Marco Caccamo (Chair of Cyber-Physical Systems in Production Engineering, TUM School of Engineering and Design). 

The goal of our Focus Group is to develop models, algorithms, and tools for designing sustainable cyber-physical systems, viz., embedded computers and software that interact with and control physical systems such machines in an industrial production plant, autonomous robots, and autonomous vehicles. Most of such systems now involve various degrees of autonomy and are ensembles of machine learning, control, networking, and real-time systems components. They increasingly consume enormous amounts of energy, require constant maintenance, monitoring, and costly debugging at times of failure. How can such systems be made more energy efficient and ideally batteryless, and be powered by energy harvesting techniques? How can they be designed to function with less powerful machine learning components but still be guaranteed to operate safely? How can they mostly use resource-constrained edge computers and access cloud computing resources only when strictly necessary? How can they automatically adapt themselves to run more efficiently and provide prior warnings before failing? Questions related to designing such embedded computer systems that are more sustainable to build, operate and maintain, constitute the research agenda of this Focus Group.