Challenges in automotive cyber-physical systems design

Systems with tightly interacting computational (cyber) units and physical systems are generally referred to as cyber-physical systems. They involve an interplay between embedded systems, control theory, real-time systems and software engineering. A very good example of cyber-physical systems design arises in the context of automotive architectures and software. Modern high-end cars have 50-100 processors or electronic control units (ECUs) that communicate over a network of buses such as CAN and FlexRay. In such complex settings, traditional control-theoretic approaches - where control engineers are only concerned with high-level plant and controller models - start breaking down. This is because implementation-level realities such as message delay, jitter, and task execution times are not adequately considered when designing the controller. Hence, it is becoming necessary to adopt a more holistic, cyber-physical systems design approach where the semantic gap between high-level control models and their actual implementations on multiprocessor automotive platforms is quantified and consciously closed. In this paper we give several examples on how this may be done and the current research challenges in this area that are being faced by the academia and the industry.