As this potential raises many questions – on a scientific, technical, and economical, but also legal and ethical level – the CyPhERS Support Action was initiated, co-funded by the European Commission, with the objective to develop a European strategic research and innovation agenda for cyber-physical systems to ensure Europe’s competitiveness in this emerging field. To obtain these research challenges and derive recommendations, five key areas of strategic importance to Europe – transport, energy, well-being, industry, and infrastructures – where chosen to identify strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities for Europe, based on the current state and future technologies as well as market potentials of cyber-physical systems.
In these key fields, cyber-physical systems provide solutions for
- smart transportation, ensuring to meet the every-increasing demand for individual transport of goods and people in a sustainable and safe way, strengthening Europe’s competitiveness in general as well as specifically as a mobility provider
- smart energy, enabling the decentralized and cooperative coordination of the electrical grid, facilitating stable integration of renewable energy resources, and enabling new, sustainable added-value services for operators and end customers
- smart health, offering personalized and proactive health support solutions for an aging society, keeping the well-being of the European citizenship affordable
- smart production, providing a shift from mass production to flexible, individually customized manufacturing, increasing Europe’s competitive both in the production as well as in industrial automation
- smart cities, help to reduce the operation and maintenance costs for European city infrastructure as well as to provide for authoritative strategic planning, while optimizing the comfort and respecting the need of the individual citizen.
However, to make these possibilities happen, several challenges have to be addressed:
Scientific: Integration of multiple paradigms affecting the construction of cyber-physical systems by specially considering their socio-technical aspects, facilitating multidisciplinary collaboration, combining the related individual theories in a common systems theory, and establishing of a body of knowledge for multi-domain modelling.
Technology: Up-scaling current engineering methods and technologies to the required level of complexity, by providing interoperable platforms/methods/tools, maturing the design and implementation of autonomous behaviour, eliminating deficits in data privacy, methodically integrating safety and security to ensure dependability, and establishing a systematic approach to deal with uncertain information.
Economy: Support for the establishment of new business models and value networks in markets disrupted through cyber-physical systems, by anticipating a shift from products to services, and being aware of the dominance of value-networks by new participants from the field of ‘cyber’-technology
Education: Provision of the required competences to the stakeholders in cyber-physical systems, by preparing education/training systems for the transfer of evolving knowledge, balancing theory and practice, and counteracting the lack of availability personnel with the required skills and expertise
Legislation: Elimination of potential innovation barriers established by existing regulations inadequate for cyber-physical systems, by eliminating unclear interpretations or restrictive application of regulations, improving techniques and tools for the certification of systems, and Europe-wide harmonizing the fragmentation of regulations.
Society: Management of change/risk-aversion in stakeholders from the public, industry, and politics, by raising awareness of the general public concerning the consequences of installing cyber-physical systems, and gathering support for acceptable risks during evolving these system from public, industry, and politics.
Consequently, actions have to be taken by academia, industry, governments and administrations, as well as the public to strengthen key research fields, accelerate the maturation of technologies, facilitate interoperability of technology, support open innovation, anticipate new business models, raise societal awareness, and ensure trustworthiness of those systems.
As cyber-physical systems draw upon many different fields of technology, non-surprisingly there is a partial overlap of the identified challenges and recommendations with strategic roadmaps from these domains, most specifically those targeting complex embedded and networked systems like the ECSEL MASRIA or the IOT Research Roadmap.
However, unlike those, here a broader look is taken on the involved disciplines and technologies, leading to a broader set of challenges and recommended actions, specifically concerning interdisciplinarity.
Furthermore, as cyber-physical systems are internationally considered of strategic importance, there is also a partial overlap concerning these challenges and recommendation with other national agendas, most specifically the recommendation from the US CPS Summit report, and the German agenda CPS. However, the specific European focus leads to some divergent findings, with respect to the former for example concerning the challenges from smart production and smart cities, or concerning the recommendations on education, regulation, business models, and societal issues; with respect to the later including European-level challenges like transport and cities, as well as providing recommendations specific to transnational European actions.
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