Designing and Assembling Smart Cyber-Physical Systems
Dealing with nowadays complex systems is very difficult. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are even more critical as they need to cope with software (in some sense something people are used to) with hardware (typically geographically distributed, among different domains). Future systems will always be a combination of physical and cyber parts, and thus it is mandatory to know how to deal will them and, in particular, consider IoT devices as full-fledged resources to play with, as we usually do with computing, storage and networking.
The summer school will introduce the participants to deal with such systems where there is no distinction among the different parts: computing, storage, networking and Internet of Things (IoT) all contribute to setting up the modern processing environments and for this reason it is mandatory to keep them simultaneously under control. In particular, the school intends to offer a comprehensive approach to design, implement and use CPSs, i.e., computing systems with a strong interaction between the physical environment (equipped with sensors and actuators) and the cyber part (the Fog and Cloud in a wide sense). Sensors, boards, edge devices, computing, storage, networking resources are seen as elements of a whole picture where everything can be virtualized and composed to create the infrastructure on top of which services and applications can be deployed. Infrastructure continuum represents our environment, where we can move from edge computing (by exploiting remote resources) to the Cloud, going through Fog resources to set up the entire framework for services deployment.
This summer school proposes a new approach to the design and programming of CPSs by considering them as complex “systems of systems” that need a specific methodology for their design and management. Better to say, all current systems are seen as CPS by nature and for this reason the interaction among the physical and the cyber parts has to be managed since the very first phases of their design. The IoT dimension is part of the overall infrastructure and IoT resources have to be considered since the very beginning, and kept at the same level of consideration of other more traditional resources such as computing, storage and networking. The school will teach how to design a network architecture with all the virtualized resources in place, how to optimise their interaction and keep everything under the full control of the system manager.
The school will drive students, researchers, practitioners, professionals to learn theory behind CPS and concretely work with CPSs putting into practice what they have learned with concrete examples and hands-on experiments. Furthermore, we contribute to improve the quality of education being the lectures also supported by the text book “Assembling Smart Cyber-Physical Systems: heterogeneous, diffuse and green technological infrastructures for cities and industries”1 authored by Z. Benomar, F. Longo, G. Merlino and A. Puliafito and a software repository with modules, components and app. This will simplify the learning process and support remote and continuous learning.
1 Each participant to the school will receive a copy of this text book