Gardening Cyber-Physical Systems

Today’s artefacts, from small devices to buildings and cities, are, or are becoming, cyber-physical socio-technical systems, with tightly interwoven material and computational parts. Currently, we have to laboriously build such systems, component by component, and the results are often difficult to maintain, adapt, and reconfigure. Even “soft”ware is brittle and non-trivial to adapt and change. If we look to nature, however, large complex organisms grow, adapt to their environment, and repair themselves when damaged. In this position paper, we present Gro-CyPhy, an unconventional computational framework for growing cyber-physical systems from computational seeds, and gardening the growing systems, in order to adapt them to specific needs. The Gro-CyPhy architecture comprises: a Seed Factory, a process for designing specific computational seeds to meet cyber-physical system requirements; a Growth Engine, providing the computational processes that grow seeds in simulation; and a Computational Garden, where multiple seeds can be planted and grown in concert, and where a high-level gardener can shape them into complex cyber-physical systems. We outline how the Gro-CyPhy architecture might be applied to a significant exemplar application: a (simulated) skyscraper, comprising several mutually interdependent physical and virtual subsystems, such as the shell of exterior and interior walls, electrical power and data networks, plumbing and rain-water harvesting, heating and air-conditioning systems, and building management control systems.