Cyber-Physical Systems

When the National Science Foundation launched its program in Cyber-Physical Computing, it turned to Illinois to lead its efforts.

Illinois research into Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) has contributed significantly to the birth to the discipline. Source of the most cited paper in real-time computing, Illinois faculty and researchers set new standards and established foundational theory in the field.

Illinois now combines its leadership in computer and software systems with some of the most exciting research in Human-Computer Interaction to address new challenges in CPS.

The coming convergence of Internet, social networking and the intelligent sensing and control of our physical environment gives us Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) that will fundamentally change how we live, learn, work in the future.

Cyber-physical systems integrate social, information, and physical components in highly interconnected and complex ways, and produce data in amounts difficult to understand and exploit.  Illinois research is working towards a holistic understanding of the behavior, properties, vulnerabilities, and guarantees of cyber-physical systems, and making new applications possible.

Illinois researchers are addressing computing challenges in Cyber-Physical Systems including:

• Complex reduction and control architectures, co-stability of CPS
• Distributed sensing systems
• Knowledge discovery
• Troubleshooting interactive complexity
• Predictable integration of COTS-based cyber-physical systems
• New abstractions at the confluence of sensing, actuation, and control
• Verification of cyber-physical systems