Let's get physical: Adding physical dimensions to cyber systems

Technology advances are creating major shifts in the industrial landscape. Traditional sectors such as transportation, medical and avionics, are witnessing fundamental changes in the supply chain and in the content where the interactions between the physical world and the computing world are becoming increasingly tight. Cyber Physical Systems, Systems of Systems, Internet of Things, Industrie 4.0, Swarm Systems and The Fog are all sectors that attract massive attention from the research communities and massive investment from industry. These concepts are tightly intertwined and describe a movement towards a fully interconnected planet where billions of devices interact via a complex mesh of wireless and wired communication infrastructures. The most compelling vision for the future of technology and industry is one where a swarm of devices is connected with the cloud to provide platforms for myriad of new applications. In this new world, new companies will arise and established ones will have to change radically their business model. The increasing sophistication and heterogeneity of these systems requires radical changes in the way sense-and-control platforms are designed to regulate them. In this presentation, I highlight some of the design challenges due to the complexity, heterogeneity and power consumption of CPS. Indeed, low power consumption is an essential requirement for the swarm of devices especially in the domain of wearable devices for healthcare. Coupled with low cost and reliability, power consumption has to be taken into consideration for any CPS deployment.