Cyber-Physical Systems as an embodiment of Digital Ecosystems extended abstract

Summary form only given. Digital Ecosystems represent the union between the digital world and real world. Cyber-Physical Systems provide a unified framework for connecting the abstract computational artifacts with the physical world. This allows for robust and flexible architectural design with multi-scale dynamics and integrated wired and wireless networking for managing the flows of mass, energy, and information in a coherent way. An example of Cyber Physical Systems is connecting sensors (which provide information from the physical world) to the internet (which represents the cyber world). Cyber-Physical Systems has recently been listed as the No.1 research priority by the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Cyber-Physical Systems framework has the capability to tackle numerous scientific, social and economical issues. However, building Cyber-Physical Systems is not a trivial task. It requires a new ground-breaking theory that models cyber and physical resources in a unified framework. Digital Ecosystems constitute a superset which includes these Cyber Physical systems. Thus the underlying theories of Digital Ecosystems will help to provide important pointers to the development of these Cyber Physical Systems. None of the current state-of-the-art methods are able to overcome the challenges of building such Cyber Physical Systems due to the fact that computer science and theories underlying the real world have developed independently based on overly-simplified assumptions of each other. For example, many key requirements (e.g. uncertainty, inaccuracy, etc.) crucial to physical systems are not captured and fully dealt within the computer science research agenda. Similarly computational complexity, system evolution, software failure and failures of computer hardware are often ignored from the viewpoint of theories of the physical world, which treats computation as a precise, error-free, static `black-box'. The solution to Cyber-Physical Systems must break the boundary between the cyber world and the physical world by providing a unified infrastructure that permits integrated models addressing issues from both worlds simultaneously. Therefore, in this keynote, we explore an approach to such an infrastructure using the framework of Digital Ecosystems.