Effective and creative Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) development requires expertise in disparate fields that have traditionally been taught in several distinct disciplines. At the same time, students seeking a CPS education generally come from diverse educational backgrounds. In this paper, we report on our recent experience of developing and teaching a course on CPS. The course addresses the following three questions: What are the core elements of CPS? How should these core concepts be integrated in the CPS design process? What types of modeling tools can assist in the design of Cyber-Physical Systems? Our experience with the first four offerings of the course has been positive overall. We also discuss the lessons we learned from some issues that were not handled well. All material including lecture notes and software used for the course are openly available online.

Effective and creative cyber-physical systems (CPS) development requires expertise in disparate fields that have traditionally been taught in several distinct disciplines. At the same time, students seeking a CPS education generally come from diverse educational backgrounds. In this paper, we report on our recent experience developing and teaching a course on CPS. The course addresses the following three questions: What are the core elements of CPS? How should these core concepts be integrated in the CPS design process? What types of modeling tools can assist in the design of cyber-physical systems? Our experience with the first three offerings of the course has been positive overall. We also discuss the lessons we learned from some issues that were not handled well. All material including lecture notes and software used for the course are openly available online. © 2014 ACM.

We continue to consider the question of what language features are needed to effectively model cyber-physical systems (CPS). In previous work, we proposed using a core language as a way to study this question, and showed how several basic aspects of CPS can be modeled clearly in a language with a small set of constructs. This paper reports on the result of our analysis of two, more complex, case studies from the domain of rigid body dynamics. The first one, a quadcopter, illustrates that previously proposed core language can support larger, more interesting systems than previously shown. The second one, a serial robot, provides a concrete example of why we should add language support for static partial derivatives, namely that it would significantly improve the way models of rigid body dynamics can be expressed. © 2014 IEEE.

Effective and creative CPS development requires expertise in disparate fields that have traditionally been taught in distinct disciplines. At the same time, students seeking a CPS education generally come from diverse educational backgrounds. In this paper we report on our recent experience developing and teaching a course on CPS. The course can be seen as a detailed proposal focused on three three key questions: What are the core elements of CPS? How can these core concepts be integrated in the CPS design process? What types of modeling tools can assist in the design of cyber-physical systems? Experience from the first two offerings of the course is promising, and we discuss the lessons learned. All materials including lecture notes and software used for the course are openly available online.

We consider the question of what language features are needed to effectively model cyber-physical systems (CPS). In previous work, we proposed a core language called Acumen as a way to study this question, and showed how several basic aspects of CPS can be modeled clearly in a language with a small set of constructs. This paper reports on the result of our analysis of two more complex case studies from the domain of rigid body dynamics. The first one, a quadcopter, illustrates that Acumen can support larger, more interesting systems than previously shown. The second one, a serial robot, provides a concrete example of why explicit support for static partial derivatives can significantly improve the expressivity of a CPS modeling language.

Comprehensive analytical modeling and simulation of cyber-physical systems is an integral part of the process that brings novel designs and products to life. But the effort needed to go from analytical models to running simulation code can impede or derail this process. Our thesisis that this process is amenable to automation, and that automating it will accelerate the pace of innovation. This paper reviews some basic concepts that we found interesting or thought-provoking, and articulates some questions that may help prove or disprove this thesis. While based on ideas drawn from different disciplines, we observe that all these questions pertain in a profound way to how we can reason and compute with real numbers.