Reliability of Cyber Physical Systems: Opportunities and Challenges

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Presented at IEEECyber 2014 by

Rui Kang

A cyber-physical system (CPS), collaborating with computational elements perceiving and controlling physical entities with high performances, is an intelligent networked information system built on embedded devices. With the help of highly integration and interaction of computational and physical units in the network environment, systems are enhanced in information processing, real-time communication, precise remote control and self-coordination. CPSs are complex systems, which are of great importance to people’s daily life, covering from nanoscale biological robots to global infrastructures such as energy coordination and management systems. Failures could lead to disastrous consequences because of the significance and breadth of such systems. Thus, safety and reliability of CPS have become key issues that users and administrators are concerned with. The requirements bring new opportunities for theory and application research of system reliability. Meanwhile, cyber physical systems are characterized by diversity and heterogeneity of the units, multilayer and distribution of the structures, openness of the system, and complexity of the environments. Local and global behaviors of the systems are also complicated due to the properties of dynamics, multi-states and nonlinearity. All the above attributes of CPS result in considerable challenges to the study on laws of failure and reliability. This paper puts forward a review on the laws of failure, modelling methods, and assessment approaches of CPSs and similar systems based on large bibliographies. The current situations and trends of reliability and works of CPSs’ reliability are concluded at the same time.