Ontario Research Fund – Round
10
IBM Canada
Ulysses Systems
London Hydro
CirtuitMeter
I-EMS
Société
de transport de l'Outaouais (STO)
“CyPreSS:
Software Techniques for the Engineering of Cyber-Physical Systems”
K. Kontogiannis (PI)
Dept. of Computer Science
Western University,
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs)
refer to systems comprising software components, physical components and social
entities which monitor, control, and coordinate processes within a physical
environment. CPSs apply to a wide range of mission-critical applications that
span from the intelligent management of logistics in complex supply
chains, advanced manufacturing systems and smart contracts, all the way to
autonomous systems, and systems that support the smart interactions between
humans and machines (M2H), or between machines (M2M). It is of no surprise that
over the past few years we witness an intense activity in the area of CPSs,
spearheaded by countries in the European Union, United States, Japan, and
China. Canada is lagging behind, despite some very
notable advances in AI and Machine Learning offer new technologies for
CPSs. Now, more than ever, there is an
urgent need for the IT industry in Ontario to actively address the emerging
demand for CPSs with state-of-the-art tools and techniques for engineering such
systems, by supporting CPSs initiatives such as the Factory of the Future, and
Smart Interactions.
The project lies within the
intersection of Software Engineering (SE), Systems Management, and Control
Theory, and aims to built upon emerging international Research and Development
efforts intended to produce models, development tools and runtime platforms for
CPSs. More specifically, the project
aims to tackle issues in six main themes of engineering CPSs. The first theme
deals with stakeholder requirements elicitation, analysis and modeling of CPSs.
The second theme deals with the design of DevOps toolchains in order to support
continuous development, deployment and evolution of CPSs. The third theme deals
with CPS architectures (cyber, physical and social), while a fourth theme
focuses on the design of run-time management and control infrastructures to
address scalability, adaptivity, compliance, and intelligent behavior. The
fifth theme deals with security and privacy, and the sixth one is concerned
with runtime contractual compliance and data management.
The project brings together
leading researchers from five Ontario Universities, experts from software and
hardware companies, as well as a network of technology receptors who are
pivotal in providing valuable use cases, and in adopting and testing the
research results of this project. The
use cases for this project aim for systems that involve collaborative agents in M2M and M2H interactions, with applications
in the Energy and Transportation sectors (smart contracts, intelligent
preventive maintenance and regulatory compliance).