Cpsf 01.1 - Cyber - Physical system fundamentals - 01.1 - 2012 - 04 - 26

Okay so... welcome to this course! Thank you all for coming! I know that you have a choice of lectures and I know that for most of you this is an elective. So thank you very much for selecting this elective. This is the course on cyber physical fundamentals and my name is Peter Marwedel and I'm obviously with Technische Universitaet... or TU Dortmund... and I'm with the computer science department there. I'd like to make sure that all of you will stay throughout the course until the very end and hopefully also pass the finals. So therefore I'd like to make sure that you're motivated enough to stay until the end of the course. It doesn't mean that the course will be very difficult but nevertheless i think it's a good idea to make sure that that you're motivated. So how can I motivate you to attend all the lectures of this course? Well, I would like to motivate you by referring to forecasts. According to many forecasts, the future of information technology is characterized by an integration of information processing into enclosing products such as cars, such as planes and trains. We also see information processing going on in robotics, in factory automation, and that means we're going to see an integration of information processing into a kind of physical environment or also some other types of enclosing systems. This trend has led to the introduction of a certain number of, I would say, buzzwords that have been cited very frequently in different types of media. So, for example, people have talked about the "disappearing computer". This doesn't mean that there will be be computers anymore. It just means that these computers will not be visible. Also, people talk about ubiquitous computing which more precisely should be called ubiquituos information. That means people are expecting any information to be available everywhere, wherever people go they would like that information to be available Also. another buzzword is the term "pervasive computing". Pervasive computing refers to the fact that computing will affect our day-to-day life and I think most of you have seen this already we have seen the impact of electronic media even on politics. We have seen an influence on the governments in certain countries as a result from pervasive computing. Also, having computing available around us means that our environment becomes, in one way or the other, "smart". This might be, for example a help to handicapped people or this might be a help to elderly people. So, in this way we are trying to achieve an ambient intelligence that means intelligence will be around us. We are also expecting that in the future there will be less and less emphasis on PC's and PC's will not be the dominating devices anymore and therefore people talk about the post PC era. That doesn't mean that we would not have any PC's in the future it just means that there are many other devices, like smartphones, like computers and robots, etc. Very recently another term has been introduced this is the term cyber physical systems This more recent term stresses the fact that information processing is more closely integrated into physical environments like cars and trains and also in the case of robots it's pretty obvious that we have an integration of information processing into the physical environment. From my point of view there are two basic technologies that are needed for making this transition happen one technology is embedded system technology and the other technology is communication technology. Now, communication technologies would be a subject by itself and I'm not going into communication technologies. That would be a separate course. In my course I'm talking about embedded system technologies as they are needed for the design of cyber physical system. Now in order to extend your motivation and in order to really make sure that you stay throughout the course I'm also referring to a national research council report that was published in the US which is entitled "Embedded Everywhere". According to that report, information technology is on the verge of another revolution. Networked systems of embedded computers have the potential to change radically the way people interact with their environment by linking together a range of devices and sensors that will allow information to be connected, shared, and processed in unprecedented ways. The use of these more computers throughout society could well dwarf previous milestones in the information revolution. So that means if we will take into account the changes that we are expecting we will possibly get the impression that the changes that happened so far with respect to office automation for example will look rather small. Of course this citation is referring to small devices so the citation is a little stronger relating to small devices such as smartphones, such as devices that are communicating via base stations, but this citation is also referring to sensors and to actuators which are not shown on the slide. So the emphasis on this slide is a little bit more towards these smaller devices and sometimes there is a question are these smaller devices also within the scope of this course? The flavor on the two slides, the flavor of the examples on these two slides is a little different. In this case we are referring to information processing that really is integrated into the physical environment, whereas on this slide we are more referring to small devices such as mobile phones where the interface to the physical environment is not that evident and it's a little bit a matter of taste to what extent we are also including these devices. We will include them in general because many of the techniques that we're needing for cyber physical systems also apply for devices such as smart phones. For example, in both cases we have to care about the energy consumption. Now using this citation we can try to anticipate the future, so we can try to predict what the future will be like. So in a sense we are trying to look into the glass ball and to see what would the future be like for computing. Well, we can try to phrase the future in a very provocative way we can try to phrase our impression of the future in an easy to remember way and this is the way in which we could do it. We could say the future is embedded, embedded is the future. we believe that in the future we are going to see many embedded devices and that it's really useful to look at embedded systems. Now this obviously means that embedded systems are very important and since much of our course will deal with embedded systems it makes a lot of sense to try to define the term embedded system. Now what's actually an embedded system? Well obviously there is the word "bed" in the term. So we might be talking about beds but since I'm from the computer science department we will obviously talk about computers. So maybe we will be talking about combinations of computers and beds. So maybe this could be an embedded system, or maybe this could be considered an embedded system as well, or maybe this could be considered an embedded systems as well. Well, these may all be embedded systems but the slide frankly has been designed to get your attention. These are not the types of embedded systems that I will be talking about. So, what will I be talking about, then? Well, we can try to define the term embedded systems and it's also important to define the term cyber physical system. For embedded systems there is one definition which I used in the first edition of my textbook. According to that definition, embedded systems are information processing systems that are embedded into a larger product. So, we are referring to a situation like the one that we see in a car where we have information processing in an enclosing product. More recently, Edward Lee of UC Berkeley wrote the following: He said "Embedded software is software integrated with physical processes, the technical problem is managing time and concurrency in computational systems". So, obviously, there is more emphasis on the link to physics and on the link to time and I think that's a very important strengthening of the link to these terms. Strictly speaking this definition is just a definition of embedded software but you can easily turn this into a definition of embedded systems by just exchanging the word software by the term system and then you would come up with a definition of embedded systems. Now, more recently, Edward Lee strengthened the linked to a physics even further by introducing a new term, and this is the new term "cyber physical system". Edward defines cyber physical systems as integrations of computation with physical processes. Now, some people are confused. Is this actually something new? Is this the same as embedded systems, is this something completely different? From my point of view, a working distinction between these two terms as the one that you see down here. We could argue that a cyber physical system is the entire system comprising the embedded system which is the information processing part and the physical environment. So that is a working distinction between these terms, so we can partition the physical systems into the embedded system part and the physical environment. Now, I'd like to strengthen your motivation even further by trying to convince you that this ubiquitous information technology, this ubiqitous computing technology, is really based on embedded systems and communication technology. So, on one hand we have all the basic techniques that you find for the construction of embedded systems. That means we need to talk about dependability, we need to talk about real time, we need to talk about A/D converters, sensors, actuators, feature extraction and recognition, possibly controlled assistance and robotics, and on the other hand there is communication technology where we are using various kinds of networking. We might consider distributed applications and we have different communication protocols and different communication medi that we are using for this communication and quality of service is of course very important. So that means for designing these very nice ubiquitous computing systems that most of you will be using in the form of smartphones we need fundamental technologies from these two areas. I'd like to strengthen your motivation even further by also looking at the economic aspect of cyber physical and embedded system. There are many statistics according to which you'll have huge growth rates and huge market shares for these types of systems. So, for example, it has been computed that about half of the Americans by now own smartphones, and that is a very steep rise from the situation that we had two or three years ago. That means there has been a growth rate for these types of products by two digit percentages. Also, there are other areas that are more linked to the physical environment. These smartphones are less so linked to the physical environment. Remote health monitoring is really linked to the physical environment and there, these was a prediction according to which the total volume for sales in that area was expected to triple between the year 2006 and the year 2011. Again, this is a growth rate where many other industry sectors would be jealous of. Due to do the large economic impact, this area was also funded by the 7th European Framework. There have been many European projects in this context and hopefully that will be also some funding in the eighth framework. Due to the importance of this area for the industry, industry has created a joint private public partnership with the European commission and created the so-called Artemis joint undertaking. Using this as a framework, industry tries to have some pre-competitive developments and some pre- competitive research projects that aim at providing some fundamental technologies for the design of these systems. The US has also recognized that this area is very important and therefore there's currently a lot of emphasis on cyber physical systems in the US. And the same is also true for other continents. We know that there is a huge effort, for example, by Taiwanese universities to establish joint education there and similar efforts exist in China and in Singapore. So again, we see that there is really a good reason to look at this technical area. Extending your motivation a little further I would like to refer to a citation which is already more than ten years old. In 1995, journalist Mary Ryan wrote that embedded chips form the backbone of the electronics-driven world in which we live. They are part of almost everything that runs on electricity. So, almost everything that somehow uses electrical voltages and and currents is an embedded system. Also it's important to look at this area because embedded and cyber physical systems are the foundation for the post-PC era so if you're looking at the post-PC era you should actually stay in this course. Also I think it's very important to stay in this course because cyber physical and embedded systems are hardly discussed in other courses, there are not that many courses in that area. I also think that these types of systems are very important for a technical university, because these are really technical systems. And, also I think that these systems are important for many industries in Europe, in Germany in particular, and also another continents like in the US and in Asia, so therefore I think you should actually try to succeed in the finals. And finally I'd like to mention that this course sets the context for specialized courses so therefore I think you should really stay until the very end. So, are there any questions at this time? So, this concludes my attempt to provide you with enough motivation to stay in the course.