Gardening Cyber-Physical Systems
Résumé
Today’s artefacts, from small devices to buildings and cities, are, or are becoming, cyber-physical socio-technical systems, with tightly interwoven material and computational parts. Currently, we have to la- boriously build such systems, component by component, and the results are often difficult to maintain, adapt, and reconfigure. Even “soft”ware is brittle and non-trivial to adapt and change. If we look to nature, how- ever, large complex organisms grow, adapt to their environment, and repair themselves when damaged. In this position paper, we present Gro-CyPhy, an unconventional computational framework for growing cyber-physical systems from com- putational seeds, and gardening the growing systems, in order to adapt them to specific needs. The Gro-CyPhy architecture comprises: a Seed Factory, a process for designing specific computational seeds to meet cyber-physical system requirements; a Growth Engine, providing the computational processes that grow seeds in simulation; and a Computational Garden, where mul- tiple seeds can be planted and grown in concert, and where a high-level gardener can shape them into complex cyber-physical systems. We outline how the Gro-CyPhy architecture might be applied to a significant exemplar application: a (simulated) skyscraper, comprising several mutually interdependent physical and virtual subsystems, such as the shell of exterior and interior walls, electrical power and data net- works, plumbing and rain-water harvesting, heating and air-conditioning systems, and building management control systems.
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