Principles of Cyber-Physical Systems (The MIT Press)

Book Preface

A cyber-physical system consists of computing devices communicating with one another and interacting with the physical world via sensors and actuators. Increasingly, such systems are everywhere, from smart buildings to medical devices to automobiles. The challenge of developing design and analysis tools to ensure reliability of such systems has attracted researchers from academia as well as industry over the past decade resulting in a vibrant and multi-disciplinary field of study.

The goal of this textbook is to provide an introduction to the principles of design, specification, modeling, and analysis of cyber-physical systems. These principles are drawn from a diverse set of sub-disciplines including model-based design, concurrency theory, distributed algorithms, formal methods for specification and verification, control theory, real-time systems, and hybrid systems. I have attempted to provide a coherent introduction to selected ideas from these different topics that are relevant to the design and analysis of cyber-physical sys tems. Throughout the textbook, mathematical concepts of modeling, specification, and analysis are illustrated by representative case studies from distributed algorithms, network protocols, control design, and robotics.

The textbook is self-contained, and is suitable for a semester-long course aimed at upper level undergraduate or first-year graduate students in computer science, computer engineering, or electrical engineering. Chapter 1 discusses alternatives for selection of topics for the organization of such a course.

My interest in cyber-physical systems is rooted in the fruitful research collaboration with Tom Henzinger on hybrid systems dating back to 1990s. Furthermore, the organization of this textbook is based on the unpublished manuscript titled Computer-Aided Verification coauthored by Tom and me. Some of the examples and figures in chapters 2 and 3 are copied from this manuscript with Tom’s permission. Thus Tom’s contribution to this textbook is invaluable and I am deeply grateful to him.

My understanding of cyber-physical systems and the contents of this book are greatly influenced by my interactions with faculty and students in PRECISE, a research center focused on cyber-physical systems in Penn Engineering. I am grateful to my colleagues Vijay Kumar, Insup Lee, Rahul Mangharam, George Pappas, Linh Phan, Oleg Sokolsky, and Ufuk Topcu for continued collaborations and support. I am also thankful to DARPA and NSF for providing sustained funding to my research projects in cyber-physical systems.

For the past five years, I have used drafts of this textbook in the course titled Principles of Embedded Computation aimed primarily at the Embedded Systems Masters program at Penn. Teaching this course on a regular basis has been a key motivating factor for finishing this book, and the feedback from students has significantly improved its contents. Thanks to all my students and also toxii Preface the wonderful teaching assistants: Sanjian Chen, Zhihao Jiang, Salar Moarref, Truong Nghiem, Nimit Singhania, and Rahul Vasist.

I have also been fortunate to receive feedback on drafts of this manuscript from researchers at other universities. In particular, chapters 6 and 9 are much improved based on the suggestions from Sriram Sankaranarayanan and Paulo Tabuada. Special thanks to Christos Stergiou for carefully proofreading a recent version and his help with Matlab simulations of the examples in chapter 9.

This is also an opportunity to thank my publisher, MIT Press, for supporting this project. In particular, Virginia Crossman, Marie Lufkin Lee, and Marc Lowenthal have offered help and encouragement throughout the process of publishing this book.

Writing a textbook takes many years, and would not have been possible without the support of my family. I am particularly grateful to my wife, Mona, for her friendship, love, and patience.

Rajeev Alur
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, USA
January 2015