Call for Papers in ASCII Format                                                           Call for Papers in PDF

 

 

 THE HIGH CONFIDENCE SOFTWARE AND SYSTEMS COORDINATING GROUP

FEDERAL NETWORKING AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE

COMMITTEE ON TECHNOLOGY OF THE NATIONAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY COUNCIL

 

National Workshop On

  High Confidence Automotive Cyber-Physical Systems

April 3-4, 2008

Troy, Michigan (USA)

 

Call for Position Papers

 

The High Confidence Software and Systems (HCSS) Coordinating Group (CG) of the Federal Networking and Information Technology R&D (NITRD) Subcommittee, Committee on Technology of the National Science and Technology Council, in cooperation with the United States Council for Automotive Research (USCAR) invite you to submit a position paper for a National Workshop on High Confidence Automotive Cyber-Physical Systems (Automotive CPS). Through this Call for Position Papers, we solicit input that can be used to help identify grand challenges, research needs, technical challenges, and a roadmap for CPS in the automotive sector. By submitting a position paper, you will have an opportunity to provide technical facts and information that potentially can help shape the future direction of CPS.

Purpose, Goals, and Focus Areas

The purpose of this workshop is to provide an open forum for leaders and visionaries from industry, research laboratories, academia, and Government to develop an attractive roadmap for the development and deployment of CPS in the automotive sector.  A CPS integrates computing, communication, and storage capabilities with the monitoring and/or control of entities in the physical world, and must do so dependably, safely, securely, efficiently and in real-time. A coherent and compelling vision needs to be developed, technical and scientific challenges must be highlighted, and promising approaches must be identified.

The workshop format will be discussion-oriented with specific goals to:

(a)     Recognize the core limitations in building today’s automotive CPS

(b)     Determine cyber-physical advances that can produce significant societal and economic impact

(c)      Understand the core technical challenges that must be addressed to enable future CPS

(d)     Compare and contrast issues from related domains including transportation/aerospace, medical device, and energy sectors

(e)     Identify cross-domain (electrical, control, system, mechanical, software, …) improvements for developing CPS correctly and quickly

(f)        Pinpoint new applications, innovations, and powerful cross-layer abstractions that will satisfy the challenging requirements of future CPS

(g)     Identify potentially transformative technologies that will enable yet to be determined capabilities

(h)      Distinguish the required educational curricula and programs to prepare the workforce to address the cyber-physical challenge in the automotive domain

Our aim is to invite all relevant stakeholders (including researchers, developers, and users) who can help identify emerging systems and assurance needs.

Automotive CPS must be dependable, secure, safe, and efficient and operate in real-time.  They must also be scalable, cost-effective, and adaptive.  They must seamlessly integrate operations in the cyber-computing and communications domain with actions and events in the physical world. This workshop will focus on promising solutions (methodologies, techniques and approaches) to satisfy these requirements, with primary emphases on innovations in observation and manipulation of the physical world, novel integration of sensors and actuators with computing and communications hardware capabilities, a scalable and reliable software infrastructure tailored to the needs of CPS, application domain-specific advances in control/hybrid systems and signal processing that enable end-to-end operation, and the design and development of high-impact applications.  In particular, abstractions and techniques that span multiple layers (including the physical world) are of special interest.  A reference architecture that can support a range of CPS is also of interest. A secondary objective is to propose core elements of a new lexicon to capture the new thinking underlying the novel scope and cross-cutting disciplinary nature of CPS to drive future innovation.

In summary, topics of interest include:

  • Grand Challenges for Automotive Cyber-Physical Systems
  • Requirements of Automotive Cyber-Physical Systems
  • Architectures for Automotive Cyber-Physical Systems
  • Technical Challenges to interface and manipulate the Physical World
  • Innovations, Ideas, Abstractions and Terminology for Cyber-Physical Systems

Background

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) allow the rapid and reliable development and integration of computer- and information-centric physical and engineered systems.  They represent a new generation of engineered systems that are highly dependable, efficiently produced, and capable of advanced real-time performance in information, computation, communication, and control.  The automotive sector is a rich target for emerging innovations in CPS.   Thanks to tens of electronic control units (ECUs), sensors and actuators now deployed in modern automobiles, features such as adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning, automated parallel parking, and traction control have become feasible.   Nevertheless, the design and development of these features tend to be traditional in nature, and extensive testing must be conducted to deliver assurance at a significant cost.  Even with extensive advances in mechanical safety and growth in passive safety devices, such as airbags, the industry continues to pursue methods to reduce the occurrence of injury.  About 42,000 fatalities and 1.5 million injuries occur every year on US roads from automobile accidents representing opportunities for societal improvement.  Delays due to traffic congestion waste enormous amounts of user productivity and finite energy resources.  Alternative designs and energy sources driven by user demand and new CAFÉ requirements also necessitate complex real-time control. This need to improve how automobiles are designed also applies to how they are manufactured. Automotive manufacturing is a substantial part of the North American economy accounting for close to 5 percent of the U.S. private sector gross domestic product.

Timelines and Guidance for Preparing Position Papers

Due to the workshop’s ambitious schedule, position papers are requested by March 10, 2008. Notifications will be sent by March 15, 2008 to all who will be invited to the workshop.

Position papers should be at most three pages in length and printed in a 12-point font on 8-1/2 by11 inch paper. Each position paper should address two to four of the workshop topics listed above. Each topic should address one or more of the following questions:

  1. What are the three fundamental limitations of today’s automotive CPS (or the designing of today’s automotive CPS)?
  2. What are the three most important research challenges?
  3. What are promising applications?
  4. What are innovations and abstractions for future automotive CPS?
  5. What are possible milestones for the next 5, 10 and 20 years?

 

In addition, each position paper should include at most a half-page bio, organization/affiliation, e-mail address, and phone number for each author. The bios are included in the 3-page limit.

Position papers should be addressed to the attention of the CPS Workshop Program Committee and submitted by e-mail to raj@ece.cmu.edu by March 10, 2008 with the Subject line “Automotive CPS Workshop Submission”.

Please note that submitted position papers will be available on-line and authors are advised not to include any proprietary information that they do not wish to be publicly disseminated.

Attendance and Participation

Workshop attendance is by invitation only. Anyone interested in participating in the workshop is encouraged to submit a position paper on the several topics outlined above by March 10, 2008. The position papers will be used to select invitees to the workshop and will assist with identifying session topics and speakers as well as report writers. Notifications will be sent by March 15, 2008 to all who will be invited to the workshop and will include information of the roles they will be asked to play.

Government representatives interested in being invited to attend as participants or observers are asked to submit a brief biography with a few sentences describing past or current interests in CPS.

We expect that travel expenses for academics attending the workshop will be subsidized (subject to maximum limits).

Deliverables

The workshop will result in a comprehensive report capturing research needs, prioritized recommendations, and a roadmap to determine what, when, and how these priorities should be addressed over an identified time frame. The organizers will deliver this report to the National Science Foundation that summarizes the workshop’s findings. Invitees will have the opportunity to provide additional inputs to the automotive CPS research roadmap.  

Website Information

The workshop Web site http://varma.ece.cmu.edu/auto-cps/ provides up-to-date information. For more information or if you wish to be put on the workshop mailing list, please contact the workshop organizers at raj@ece.cmu.edu.