Science of Design for Societal-Scale Cyber-Physical Systems

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Werner Damm; Professor Dr. Martin Fränzle; Professor Dr. Frank Köster; Professor Dr. Sebastian Lehnhoff; Dr. Andreas Lüdtke; Professor Dr. Alexander Pretschner; Professor Dr. Jochem Rieger
• Subject Area: Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing ; Automation, Mechatronics, Control Systems, Intelligent Technical Systems, Robotics ; Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience ; Security and Dependability, Operating-, Communication- and Distributed Systems
• Term: from 2018 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 392437295

The project constitutes a concerted effort with its American partner proposal aiming at methods for rigorously resolving causes of societal tensions developing around human-cyber-physical system (H-CPS). H-CPS are the natural evolution of cyber-physical systems into human-in-the-loop and socio-technical systems. Building on the rapidly growing number of networked sensors, actuators, and computers deployed into our physical environment, the tight integration of humans within such H-CPS provides new forms of autonomous systems, where division of control can be dynamically shifted between humans and machines. Due to the development of appropriate industrial platforms, like the Internet-of-Things, H-CPS are about to develop into societal-scale systems. The resultant societal worries about individual and societal controllability, safety, security, protection of privacy, and resilience against unforeseen situations call for appropriate design and analysis methods being able to guarantee these. As these worries and likewise the preferences and regulations concerning means of counteracting them obviously underlie both societal as well as situational variability, H-CPSs ought to be parameterized by and adaptive to their current societal and situational context. Fostering rigorous methods for the development and deployment of societal-scale H-CPS being able to accommodate to local policies and regional and possibly even temporary societal requests rather than imposing a uniform supplier-enforced strategy, the transatlantic partner projects address fundamental research in the areas of incentive engineering, policy-aware architecture synthesis, on-line conflict resolution, and auditing in H-CPS. Providing key ingredients of such an endeavor, the German project activities do specifically focus on (1) studies with humans in the loop of simulated societal-scale H-CPS aiming at first identifying cross-Atlantic differences, second understanding and modeling relevant cognitive processes, and third studying incentivization, (2) the establishment of formal models and requirement specification languages permitting the capture of contextually and situationally varying objectives and preferences in societal-scale H-CPS as well as algorithmic means for optimally resolving these, (3) run-time mechanisms enforcing accountability through trustworthy monitoring and logging based on rigorous assignment of causality, thereby fostering integrity and respecting legal implications. These provide crucial building blocks for a science of goal-directed design for societal-scale H-CPS to be promoted jointly by the two transatlantic partner projects.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: USA
• Partner Organisation: National Science Foundation (NSF)
• Cooperation Partners: Professor David Hess, Ph.D.; Professor Xenofon Koutsoukos, Ph.D.; Professor S. Shankar Sastry, Ph.D.; Professor Janos Sztipanovits, Ph.D.; Professorin Claire J. Tomlin