7. Cyber-Physical Systems: Historical Evolution and Role in Future Autonomous Transportation

The revolutionary research and experiments in the field of computing and communicating technologies have resulted in a dramatic impact on the applications with societal and economic benefit. With the evolution of the Internet, it is now possible to connect every object or thing in the physical world. These things can communicate and also perform computations. It is now possible for humans to communicate with the physical things around us. This leads us to explore a whole new technology called Cyber Physical System (CPS). CPS combines computation, communication and control technologies in order to integrate the existing networked systems and embedded systems. It has modules to perform accurate data acquisition. These modules are basically distributed devices. Further the acquired data is sent to a layer of information processing as per the service requirements. There are enormous applications of CPS namely: digital medical devices, autonomous vehicles, robotic systems, intelligent highways, aerospace systems, industry automation, building and environment control and physical process control. Among the listed applications, autonomous transportation is evolving through the ongoing research trends. In autonomous transportation systems, there is a high requirement for reliable communication between the communicating entities, accurate data acquisition and processing and high computing capabilities. Thus CPS is a novel engineering system that can suit the requirements of autonomous transportation. In this chapter we discuss the evolution of CPS and its role in future autonomous transportation. We explore the research challenges in the CPS based on autonomous transportation.