Complexity Challenges in Cyber Physical Systems

14A Research Agenda for Complexity in Application of Modeling and Simulation for Cyber Physical Systems Engineering

Andreas Tolk¹ and Saurabh Mittal²

¹ The MITRE Corporation, Hampton, VA, USA

² The MITRE Corporation, Fairborn, OH, USA

14.1 Introduction

This compendium is not the first book on Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) resulting in the need to align research better and create a common research agenda. The authors themselves already contributed similar recommendations for the related topics systems of systems (Tolk and Rainey 2014) and complex systems engineering (Diallo et al. 2018). However, while these research ideas are surely applicable, with this compendium we put the focus on cyber‐physical systems, so that the research agenda must become more focused as well.

During one of the initial NSF Workshops on CPS, Edward Lee proposed a research agenda (Lee 2006). At this 2006 workshop, most CPS expert had a strong control theory and electrical engineering background, as it was typical for the robotics community. Accordingly, the recommendations were targeted at their research domains and focused on better support to control functions needed for robots, down to memory managements, alignment of pipeline structures for route management of control, and other hardware‐near computational challenges. Interestingly, the recommendations have three common themes: (i) introduction of time to cope with the dynamic behavior of the CPS and its environment, (ii) predictability of control ...