CPS Laboratory-as-a-Service: Enabling Technology for Readily Accessible and Scalable CPS Education

Future generations of cyber-physical systems (CPS) engineers and scientists must be ready to tackle the increasingly complex problems facing society. While it is possible for these students to gain a theory-based CPS education from the growing CPS scientific literature, we believe, however, that theoretical understanding alone is not sufficient particularly when CPS involve complex interactions between the cyber, physical, and sometimes, human realms. When coupled with practical handson CPS education, students will be able to experiment with realistic situations, which will better enable them to engineer high confidence CPS of the future. Unfortunately, there continues to be a dearth of readily available experimental CPS laboratories, which means that the graduating students remain unprepared to handle the monumental challenges facing society. To address this urgent societal need, we present CPS Laboratory-as-a-Service (CPS-LaaS), which leverages the principles of cloud computing, resource virtualization, and analogous systems that together enable CPS laboratories to be offered as a service on massive scales while eliminating the need to provide in-house laboratory resources at each institution. As a concrete example, we present Composable Conveyor System (CCS) as a sample playground for CPS experimentation and discuss the education opportunities for CPS experimentation in this concrete example. A key outcome of designing CPS-LaaS is an expectation of significant new scientific discoveries in the CPS realm.