Cyberphysical Systems: A Behind-the-Scenes Foundational View
Richard Banach, Wen Su · Research Explorer (The University of Manchester) · 2018
Hybrid and cyberphysical systems pose significant challenges for formal development approaches based on pure discrete events. In this essay, after a brief look at the CPS landscape, the foundations of CPS systems are examined from the ground up, with a particular view to aspects rooted in the continuous part of the CPS spectrum. We take a journey starting from the foundations, through a number of ways of addressing the continuous mathematicsm aspects, to phenomena latent only in the world of physical descriptions, such as the onset of instability due to passing through bifurcation points in the problem parameter space. We argue that such phenomena, that can plague CPS design when optimising for performance metrics, can only be understood by sufficient engagement with the continuous world.