Applied Cyber-Physical Systems

The term “cyber-physical system” (CPS) sounds like a brand-new buzzword as it occurs increasingly as a theme of many conferences, in journal articles and books—like this one. Etymologically the prefix cyber derives from the ancient Greek word κυβέρνησις (kybernesis) and originally means control skills. It evolved into the Latin word guvernare and finally the English word to govern. For our context this means that we speak about systems in which physical objects and computational resources are tightly integrated and exhibit a degree of continuous coordination between each other.

Cyber-physical systems are an emerging domain of warfare, terrorism, and crime, while simultaneously being the platform and engine for economic, civil, and democratic development in the 21st century. The protection and sustainable growth of cyberspace is necessary for advancement of civilization and the pursuit of the noble goals of humanity. However, it has become common in the last decade to learn of cyber exploitations that threaten the safety and security of daily life as we know it.

Enormous challenges face our nation regarding the security, safety and efficient operation of cyber-physical infrastructure. At many levels, cyber-physical infrastructure presents systemic challenges. The same challenge represents an opportunity for education and economic development. Starting from the assertion that education and economic development initiatives are best aligned with regional goals, this paper proposes a regional, transdisciplinary approach for educating students in cyber-physical systems. The established disciplines relevant to the approach are identified, their principles extracted, and a transdisciplinary methodology is derived using Programs of Study as a framework for regional organization. The pilot application of this methodology in San Antonio, Texas, USA is described. The transdiscipline proposed creates a holistic, integrated culture, and the pragmatic foundation of Programs of Study provides a basis and context for immediate action and further research.

Cyber security professionals are publicly acknowledging [1, 2], that the traditional approaches to securing information fail because the threat environment has become impossibly complex. This chapter on a fundamentally new approach to securing information that can radically simplify cyber security.

Discussed is an Intelligent Information Agent (I ² A) architecture for real-time, adaptive, need-to-know, authorization of access to confidential/classified information. The “Need-to-know” paradigm for information content access and access to application and service execution is desperately needed for the ubiquitous non-traditional physical computing systems (e.g. refrigerators, wearable computers, engine sub-systems etc.), beginning to connect into the cyber mesh. The multi-agent system is based on the ELYSE cognitive neural, intelligent agent framework and provides “need-to-know” context-based authorization of requests for access to confidential/classified information. “Need-to-know” authorization is that which grants access to confidential/classified information only if that information is necessary for the requestor’s task, based on their roles and credentials. In this system, authorization is treated as a text classification problem utilizing fuzzy-neural, self-organizing semantic maps which learn a learn decision criteria based on label information and are capable of generalizing this learned behavior to other information with a zero, or near-zero, false alarm rate. Since “need-to-know” authorizations must be determined for multiple tasks, multiple users, and multiple collections of information, with quick turn-around from request to delivery, the authorization agents must be adaptive and capable of learning new profiles rapidly and with little impact on the overall system performance. We define five different classification methods and provide an architectural framework for the agent system.

Concerns with the security of the cyber-physical systems include the malicious attempts by an adversary to intercept, disrupt, defect or fail cyber-physical systems that may affect a large group of population, an important government agency or an influential business entity by denying availability of services, stealing sensitive data, or causing various types of damages, as well as the security breaches in small scale cyber-physical systems that may affect few individuals or relatively smaller entities.

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) include hardware, software, and network entities, while considering the limitations of human element as well. CPSs are based on the embedded systems. In situations requiring reliable operations, embedded system designs are generally preferred.

This chapter will look at various applications of natural language communication to cyber-physical systems. One of the assumptions that it makes is that such communication is not only necessary for the future systems, but also should be done on a level acceptable and natural to humans, rather than training them to accommodate machine capabilities with exact and precise commands. We will address a grain size of commands or descriptions that could be given to a system—at the same time the physical capabilities of a system will be sketched only as needed for purposes of examples. The range of commands that we are talking about is a typical algorithmic description of a task at the low level and a natural one for a human task description on the high level. A low, more detailed, fine-grain-sized level is assumed to exist already. The higher, coarser-grain-sized level is what we are striving for, in the sense of being able to switch to it automatically when convenient, i.e., to pay with some vagueness, as people and language do, for the ease of not having to resolve an ambiguity.

Information and language processing in a growing variety of computer applications can achieve the accuracy/precision and reliability that human users require if based on human-like understanding. While statistical and/or machine learning methods in text processing have been perfected in the last two decades (see, for instance, [1, 2] and references there), their successes have been limited in scope, primarily to the clustering tasks, and even there, the applications have excelled better in recall than in precision, leading to customer disappointments with commercial products.

This chapter on the dissertation of U. John Tanik [1] by describing an automated approach to Cyber-Physical Systems design utilizing an Adaptive Cyber-Physical System Framework (ACPSF). The ACPSF is based on the Artificial Intelligence Design Framework (AIDF) supported by a NASA training grant from 2004 to 2006 at UAB [2].

The conceptual frameworks and information architectures of app-centric software ecosystems and cyber-physical systems (CPS) provide complimentary approaches to modeling systems. When integrated, these frameworks combine to become cyber-physical ecosystems (CPE). CPE are CPS whose constituent members, themselves CPS, meet the criteria for consideration as apps. Alternatively, CPE may be viewed as app-centric software ecosystems whose shared data environment includes the physical operating environment of the apps. By taking an app-centric approach to CPS integration, a semantically driven, information architecture based decomposition of a larger CPS into it’s component CPS becomes possible.

The purpose of this chapter is to study how to assess patient-centered health-care quality and as a follow-up, how to mitigate the unwanted risk to a tolerable level, through automated software utilizing game-theoretic risk computing. Chapter overall seeks methods about how to improve patient-centered quality of care in the light of uncertain nationwide health care quality mandate to disseminate and utilize results for the “most bang for the buck”. A patient-centered composite ‘credibility’ or ‘satisfaction’ score is proposed for the mutual benefit of patients seeking quality care, and hospitals delivering the promised healthcare, and insurance companies facilitating a financially accountable healthcare. Patient-centered quality of care risk assessment and management are inseparable aspects of health care in a hospital, yet both are frequently overlooked. In Alabama State, a 2004 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found substantial dissatisfaction with the quality of health care. In response to whether they were dissatisfied with the quality of healthcare, 44 % of Latinos, 73 % of Blacks, and 56 % of Whites said “Yes”. When asked whether health care has gotten worse in the prior five years prior, 39 % of Latinos, 56 % of Blacks, and 38 % of Whites reported dissatisfaction.

The various techniques that have been proposed so far in the literature for voice and video conferencing do not always properly address all the pertinent concerns of multimedia communications featuring internet telephony. The session initiation protocol (SIP) is the standard internet protocol (IP) for voice and video communications over internet. The hardware and resource utilization in such cases plays a significant role in multimedia telephony systems in particular. This chapter explores the possible role of SIP servers and related enhancements made to internet telephony protocols designed specifically for multimedia conferencing. In the process, the chapter presents a comprehensive analysis of data collected through testing of the SIP server under test (SUT) involving a large number of telephone calls.

This chapter develops a conditional reliability model for an operational lifecycle of a periodically used vehicle such as aircraft, considering the option of real-time update of aircraft conditions and related Cyber-Physical System (CPS) framework for real-time collection, processing, analysis, and actionable control. The efficiency of maintenance is analysed. Paradigm of active conditional control timing (ACT) is introduced, aiming an overall improvement in reliability. The effect of active condition control is estimated taking into account (a) awareness of possible faults during the aircraft mission and (b) periods of maintenance sequences over life cycle. Shown is that active conditional control supported by maintenance procedures could substantially improve aircraft mission reliability.

In today’s health care environment, it is common to have patient connected to several medical devices simultaneously. These devices can be responsible for monitoring several critical patient parameters such as body temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure. Medical professionals who are in close proximity to these devices get the information provided by various devices and take the necessary action needed such as adjusting the dose of the drug delivered or regulate the breathing. Patient’s life supporting units become totally dependent on medical professionals. Humans are subject to fatigue, miscommunication, distractions, and misinterpretation of the information, and several other factors. These can produce an undesirable patient outcome.

Radio frequency identification devices (RFIDs) have been used widely in industrial and medical applications due to the fact they bridge the real and the virtual worlds and enable information transfer at a large scale in a cost effective way. These devices use radio waves for non-contact reading and are effective in manufacturing and several other applications where bar code labels could not survive.

Computers are getting smaller and their capabilities increase incredibly. However, even today computing includes human control to enter data and interpret the results. Even for modern systems like transportation, healthcare and similar safety critical missions require human control to ensure the safety of human life. As a result of the increase in complexity, it has been getting harder to manage these systems just by humans for every possible case. For example railway signalization is already very complex and hard task to handle just by human capabilities. Huge number of variables in such an equation needs intelligent systems which can also control physical world in addition to data acquisition and report. Conventional control systems programmed for specific tasks, are unable to adapt themselves to changing conditions and environments. Therefore less control on physical world conditions due to this insufficient intelligence capacity makes them unusable.