Ricerc@Sapienza

A Cyber-physical Systems of Systems (CPSoS) consists of a set of (possibly geographically distributed) networked systems (constituent systems). A constituent system may be itself a Cyber-physical System (CPS), a purely computational system (e.g., software running on a computer), a communication system (e.g., devices supporting wired or wireless communication). Examples of CPSoS are: transport networks (e.g., smart grids, railways, etc), large manufacturing facilities, a swarm of drones or even a single aircraft. In fact, all such systems consists of networked systems controlled by a considerable number of distributed computing elements and, possibly, human users.

Many CPSoS are safety or mission critical system. Accordingly, errors in their design may lead to loss of human life (safety critical systems) or substantial economic losses. The situation is further exacerbated by the ever increasing demand for autonomous behaviour in CPSoS. This state of affairs, together with the never ending aim at decreasing design cost, makes CPSoS design and verification more and more challenging.

This motivates development of methods and software tools to support the design-operation continuum of autonomous CPSoS. Accordingly our project main goal is that of developing algorithms and software tools to improve quality and decrease cost of software development and operations for autonomous CPSoS.

We pursue our project goals through four pillars: 1) Modelling and simulation pillar, aiming at developing our project simulation-based computational infrastructure; 2) Design pillar, aiming at developing software tools to support synthesis and verification of CPSoS coordination software; 3) Operations pillar, aiming at developing software tools to support CPSoS operations; 4) Case studies and evaluation pillar, aiming at assessing our methods and software tools through case studies.