Cyber-Physical Systems: A Literature Review
European Scientific Journal December 2017 edition Vol.13
Cyber-Physical Systems: A Literature Review
Matthew N. O. Sadiku 0
Yonghui Wang 0
Suxia Cui 0
Sarhan M. Musa 0
0 Roy G. Perry College of Engineering Prairie View A&M University Prairie View , TX 77446 , USA
Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are smart systems that depend on the synergy of cyber and physical components. They link the physical world (e.g. through sensors, actuators, robotics, and embedded systems) with the virtual world of information processing. Applications of CPS have the tremendous potential of improving convenience, comfort, and safety in our daily life. This paper provides a brief introduction to CPSs and their applications.
Cyber-physical systems; mobile CPS
-
typically confined to a single device, a CPS may encompass many
constituent systems and devices. CPSs will bring advances in personalized
health care, emergency response, traffic flow management, electric power
generation and delivery, and “smart" anything (e.g., cars, buildings, homes,
cities, manufacturing, hospitals, appliances).
Features of cps
As illustrated in Figure 1, CPSs are complex systems with the
integration of computation, communication, and control (3C) technology
(Wan, et al., 2011)
. They combine cyber capabilities (computation and
communication) with physical capabilities (sensors and actuators). CPS can
be found nearly anywhere, including medicine, automobiles, electric power
grids, city infrastructure, manufacturing, aircraft, and building systems.
A CPS has three main components: (1) a physical system, (2)
networking and communication element, (3) a distributed cyber system.
CPSs are designed with a set of distributed hardware, software, and network
components which are embedded in physical systems and environments. The
software plays the most important role; it includes all software programs for
processing, filtering, and storing information. CPSs interact with the physical
system through networks. The major characteristics of CPS include
distributed real-time, scalability, and reliability. Most CPSs support
realtime applications such as real-time monitoring, real-time control, and
realtime forecasting.
As shown in Figure 2, CPS operates at three layers: perception,
transmission, and application
(Ashibani and Mahmoud, 2017)
. The
perception layer (or sensors layer) has terminal devices such as sensors,
actuators, cameras, GPS, RFID tags, and readers. These devices possess the
ability to collect real-time data such as sound, light, hear, electricity or
location and perform commands from the application layer. The transmission
layer (or network layer) interchanges and processes data between the
perception and the application. Transmission is achieved using local area
networks, the Internet or communication technologies such as Wi-Fi,
Bluetooth, ZigBee, and infrared. The application layer processes information
from transmission layer and issues commands to be executed by the sensors
and actuators. The main objective of the layer is to create a smart
environment.
Mobile cyber physical systems are special CPSs with inherent
mobility. Smartphone platforms make ideal mobile cyber-physical systems.
Typical examples of mobile cyber-physical systems include applications to
detect traffic accidents, measure traffic, and monitor cardiac patients
(Cyberphysical system, 2017)
.
Applications
Common applications of CPS typically fall under sensor-based
communication-enabled autonomous systems. These include smart power
grid, autonomous automotive systems, medical monitoring, process control
systems, distributed robotics, and automatic pilot avionics. Development of
new smart CPSs will drive innovation and competition in sectors such as
agriculture, energy, transportation, building design and automation,
healthcare, and manufacturing. Some of these applications are further
explained as follows
(Zanni, 2015)
(Khaitan and McCalley, 2015)
(AlJaroodi, et al., 2016).
Manufacturing: CPSs are vital to preserving our national
competiveness in manufacturing. They can improve processes by sharing
real-time information among the industrial machines, manufacturing supply
chain, suppliers, business systems, and customers. They enable complete
optimization of a manufacturing plant, where information can be
communicated among industrial machines.
Healthcare: Rising healthcare costs, an aging population, and
diminishing medical resources are driving health-care providers to seek
technological innovations. CPSs are used for real-time and remote
monitoring of the physical conditions of patients to limit patient
hospitalization or to improve treatments for disabled and elderly patients.
CPSs also enable intelligent operating rooms and hospitals and the
development of physical prostheses. Health CPS will replace traditional
health devices in the future. Figure 3 shows an example of medical robotic
CPS
(D’Auria and Persia, 2017)
. CPSs are poised to transform the
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