On Coordination of Cyber-physical Systems

The physical world will be saturated by networked devices with sensing and actuating capabilities. This trend will generate profound impacts on our way of monitoring and controlling the physical world, and meanwhile bring us towards a cyber-physical convergence era. Along this trend, a new type of systems, named Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), is developed by taking into consideration the cyber and physical world interactions. CPS refer to the integrated systems with both cyber and physical aspects, and their applications have been envisioned to generate grand societal and economic impacts. In this dissertation, we study the requirements and fundamental problems in CPS design. More specifically, we address the issue of how devices in distributed CPS coordinate their activities in order to achieve different goals in CPS applications. Examples of the coordination goals include cooperation of devices for verifying and maintaining desired system properties, and adapting to external situations, etc. Traditional methods of dealing with coordination have become insufficient in the CPS scenarios due to CPS’ special characteristics, such as tight coupling of cyber and physical components, and safety/time critical nature. Moreover, the internal and external environments of CPS are intrinsically associated with diverse uncertainties, such as variation of network conditions, unpredictable user interactions, etc. Those uncertainties further complicate the coordination. This dissertation actually has made original