Cyber-physical systems—exemplary applications and a distributed execution platform

In this paper, we first introduce several application domains for cyber-physical systems (CPS). The implementation of such applications is a challenging task since it does not only require the developer to consider distribution and concurrency- which are already error-prone aspects in distributed systems-but also real space and time. If motion of the usually heterogeneous executing components of the CPS is necessary, then this has to be precisely coordinated and controlled. As a result, the application programmer is confronted with a variety of aspects that need to be taken into account carefully. In order to relieve programmers from this high complexity, we present an operating system that provides high level operations whose execution can be bound to space and time. All complexity is hidden from the programmer and moved beyond the system's interface. The system consists of a core-system and an extension layer which enables to add more features in terms of capabilities. New capabilities and new executing components can be added on the fly. The major component of the core is an online-scheduler that assigns spatio-temporal tasks (created by the application) to capabilities of the executing components. If motion is required, then the scheduler computes collision-free spatio-temporal trajectories in order to achieve coordinated movement. As a proof-of-concept, we present experiments on our testbed.