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Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are a result of highly cross-disciplinary processes and are evolving to perform increasingly challenging tasks in dynamically changing environments. This leads to an increasing CPS complexity and therefore the management of uncertainty to ensure the trustworthiness of these systems is needed. Our paper focuses on uncertainty management (UM) both in general and more specifically in the context of CPS situation awareness (SA). The motivation behind this is the important role of SA and its many inherent uncertainties. To this end, firstly, a literature review is conducted to acquire the state of the art of UM. Later, we present findings and observations from the literature review, with two main challenges identified - inconsistent understanding and terminology among a multitude of uncertainty perspectives, and a lack of collaboration among different communities. On this basis, lastly, two case studies are conducted to exemplify the challenges and provide brief ideas on how to deal with them. The whole investigation in the paper suggests an urgent strengthening of common understanding through enhanced collaboration and regulations.

Education of future engineers and other stakeholders will be of paramount importance for designing, producing, procuring, operating and managing future Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) of unprecedented complexity that will underpin most technological systems in society. We investigate the relation between CPS, Systems Engineering (SE) and the Conceive - Design - Implement -Operate (CDIO) engineering education initiative with the aim to find ways of improving current CPS education. With its emphasis on experiences with realistic engineering settings, lifecycle perspective and complementary skills in communication and collaboration, CDIO provides several ingredients that are essential for future engineers. SE with its set of best practices and systems thinking, provides guidelines and practices of strong relevance for most (if not all) engineering programs and especially for those involving the engineering of highly complex systems such as CPS. We conclude that applying a CDIO approach for a CPS program together with infusion of a suitable portion of SE practices appears to be a promising way forward to reform CPS programs. We discuss how such SE practices can be integrated into engineering programs and in particular propose aspects of SE that would be useful to incorporate into capstone courses (larger education projects in the final master level stages).

Education and training face several challenges as our society is evolving to become increasingly dependent on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). We present and discuss how education is impacted, leveraging mainly a cross-domain investigation of CPS challenges of the EU CyPhERS project. In particular, the investigation revealed challenges that go beyond engineering education and that were found to be common across domains; (i) the need to consider and to include a broader set of stakeholders including policy makers and the general public to raise awareness of CPS technology implications (opportunities, risks and challenges), (ii) emphasizing human centered perspectives including sustainability and privacy in CPS education to make sure we end up with a human centric CPS-based society, (iii) improving the status of teaching, and (iv) supporting educational platforms and life-long learning capabilities. We conclude by discussing implications for educational systems.

As the Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) of self-driving vehicles increase, it is necessary to investigate the Electrical/Electronic(E/E) system architectures for autonomous driving, beyond proof-of-concept prototypes. Relevant patterns and anti-patterns need to be raised into debate and documented. This paper presents the principal components needed in a functional architecture for autonomous driving, along with reasoning for how they should be distributed across the architecture. A functional architecture integrating all the concepts and reasoning is also presented.

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".

This paper introduces design contracts between control and embedded software engineers for building Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). CPS design involves a variety of disciplines mastered by teams of engineers with diverse backgrounds. Many system properties influence the design in more than one discipline. The lack of clearly defined interfaces between disciplines burdens the interaction and collaboration. We show how design contracts can facilitate interaction between 2 groups: control and software engineers. A design contract is an agreement on certain properties of the system. Every party specifies requirements and assumptions on the system and the environment. This contract is the central point of inter-domain communication and negotiation. Designs can evolve independently if all parties agree to a contract or designs can be modified iteratively in negotiation processes. The main challenge lies in the definition of a concise but sufficient contract. We discuss design contracts that specify timing and functionality, two important properties control and software engineers have to agree upon. Various design approaches have been established and implemented successfully to address timing and functionality. We formulate those approaches as design contracts and propose guidelines on how to choose, derive and employ them. Modeling and simulation support for the design contracts is discussed using an illustrative example.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are becoming indispensable in our modern way of life. As an application domain CPS is not new. As an intellectual discipline, however, it is. This paper focuses on CPS modeling, which is an essential activity in CPS design, with multiple challenges. In particular, stakeholders lack a systematic framework and guidelines to help them choose among the many available modeling languages and tools. We propose such a framework in this paper. Our framework consists of three elements: viewpoints, which capture the stakeholders’ interests and concerns; concrete languages and tools, among which the stakeholders must make a selection when defining their CPS design environments; and abstract, mathematical formalisms, which are the “semantic glue” linking the two worlds. As part of the framework, we survey various formalisms, languages, and tools and explain how they are related. We also provide examples of viewpoints and discuss how they are related to formalisms. QC 20150521

One central issue in system structuring and quality prediction is the interdependencies of system modules. This paper proposes a novel technique for determining the operational coupling in embedded computer control systems. It allows us to quantify dependencies between modules, formed by different kinds of relationships in a solution, and therefore promotes a more systematic approach to the reasoning about modularity. Compared to other existing coupling metrics, which are often implementation-technology specific such as confining to the inheritance and method invocation relationships in OO software, this metrics system considers both communication and synchronization and can be applied throughout system design. The metrics system has two parts. The first part supports a measurement of coupling by considering individual relationship types separately. The quantification is performed by considering the topology of connections, as well as the multiplicity, replication, frequency, and accuracy of component properties that appear in a relationship. The second part provides a methodology for combining coupling by individual relationship types into an overall coupling, where domain specific heuristics and technology constraints are used to determine the weighting.