Self-Awareness in Cyber-Physical Systems

The concept of self-awareness has become a hot research topic in a variety of disciplines such as robotics, artificial intelligence, control theory, networked systems, and so on. Its applicability has been explored in various application domains such as automotive, consumer electronics, industrial control, medical equipment, and so forth. The topic owes its attractiveness to many examples in insects, animals and humans, where self-awareness is attributed to facilitate highly resilient and outstandingly efficient behaviors. Thus, self-awareness holds the promise to promote dependability in all types of smart gadgets and artificial agents in the interconnected world of future.This tutorial will introduce the concepts surrounding self-awareness in the context of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). A key facet of CPS is the inherent control function where the environment is sensed, the system is analyzed, and adaptions are applied to respect constraints and achieve desired goals. In control theory the design and analysis of autonomous systems has long been subject of intensive research. In recent years self-awareness has been proposed as a handle to equip traditional control systems with a deeper understanding about itself and its environment in the context of the goals of the system. The design community of complex hardware integrated circuits, embedded and cyber-physical systems has also recognized self-awareness as a means to improve dependable behavior in the presence of uncertainties, faulty components and unexpected changes of the environment.