National Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems Research Directions for Transportation: Aviation, Automobiles and Rail

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports a National Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Research Directions for Transportation: Aviation, Automobiles and Rail. The workshop is to be held in Seattle, Washington, November 18-20, 2008, with sponsorship from the NITRD High Confidence Software and Systems interagency Coordinating Group. The purpose of the meeting is to identify common needs and research challenges that must be addressed to support the healthy future of constituent transportation sectors (e.g., aviation, automotive, railway) and for the collective transportation sector as a whole. All sectors share the characteristic that future vehicles will interact with other vehicles and with a dramatically changing infrastructure in a way that is fundamentally cyber-enabled. Cyber-physical systems are systems in which networked, real-time, embedded control is pervasive at all levels of integration, and there is a continuum of autonomy and authority shared by humans and systems. When viewed as cyber physical systems, future vehicle and transportation system designs can lead to improvements in safety, security, energy-efficiency, control, and maintenance of such systems. This national workshop will help to facilitate the identification of common as well as distinct research needs of the sectors and the research challenges that will be identified by viewing these large distributed systems, with heterogeneous constituent vehicular systems, as dynamic cyber-physical systems.