Cyber-Physical Systems
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are "computer- and information-centric physical and engineered systems." (from http://varma.ece.cmu.edu/cps/). There is a major new initiative from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to promote research into foundations and technologies related to these systems. A primary focus is on making the systems dependable, trustworthy, secure, and efficient.
My interest in CPS is primarily from the perspective of testing and is focused on two projects: Wireless Sensor Network Testbeds and Trustworthiness Testing.
Wireless Sensor Network Testbed
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are self-organizing, robust networks of sensor motes that act together to collect and transmit sensor data to a base-station. There are many interesting applications of WSNs including: monitoring movement and stress in buildings and bridges, collecting temperature, humidity and other weather-related data in the vicinity of wildfires, monitoring the health of large ocean tankers, etc. WSN motes typically have limited computational power, are battery powered, and have sharp responses to changes in their operating environment. An important aspect of designing and building wireless sensor network systems is making them tolerant and robust in the face of the realities of their operating environment. However, testing these properties in a systematic and controlled way is difficult. The goal of this project is to create a physical testbed for wireless sensor networks that enables engineers to configure, execute and monitor system-level tests of a deployed WSN in a controlled and repeatable manner.
I am working with the following students on this project:
- Swayanti Das
- Akash Jain
Trustworthy Systems of Collaborative, Autonomous Agents
I am working with Dr. Anneliese Andrews and Dr. Kimon Valavanis to develop a framework and process for testing large-scale systems of collaborative, autonomous agents. "Agents," in this context, is a generic term for entities in these systems and may be as varied as: software running desktop or server computers, wireless sensor network nodes, unmanned airplaines, helicopters, or robots, handheld devices, nano-sensors, etc. Systems at this scale and this complexity must be tolerant to faults and trustworthy enough to adapt and degrade their capabilities gracefully in the face of those faults. The focus of this research project is to develop methods, tools and techniques for ensuring that systems are not only "functional", but also "trustworthy". This involves developing and adapting models the system itself, potential faults, the environment, different behavior of agents in the face of failures, and combining them into a test-ready model that can be used as the basis for definition of test adequacy criteria, test oracles (expected behavior), and test requirements.
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