Autonomous perception and decision-making in cyber-physical systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) belong to a relatively new interdisciplinary technology area in the science of autonomy, which includes the general class of embedded and hybrid systems. In CPS, the physical space is the source of information and the cyber space makes use of the generated information to identify pertinent events and to make decisions that, in turn, affect the physical space. The underlying computational and physical processes need to be integrated at appropriate temporal and spatial scales, which may require modeling and analysis of a variety of physical quantities for information generation and decision & control. To this end, the paper proposes an architecture for autonomous perception-based decision & control of complex cyber-physical systems.