1.4: Smart Planet
Creating the Smart Planet Other Information:
A smarter world will be one in which all kinds of objects, devices, and large-scale physical systems are interconnected, compute-empowered,
and instrumented to perform tasks (monitoring, regulating, measuring, analyzing, alerting, etc.) with, on behalf of, and in
the best interest of people. This infrastructure will also enable people to collaborate in real time, dynamically creating
short-term ad hoc networks linking them to devices, data and information, computing platforms, and applications as needed.
Some components of the smart planet infrastructure will be stand-alone robotic systems designed to perform tasks autonomously;
others will be what are now called cyber-physical systems. These are networked computing systems – interconnected software,
microprocessors, sensors, and actuators – deeply integrated within engineered physical systems to monitor and control capabilities
and behaviors of the physical system as a whole. Such systems are already essential to the effective operation of U.S. defense
and intelligence systems and critical infrastructures (e.g., air-traffic-control, power-grid, and water-supply systems), industrial-process
control systems, and other large-scale civilian systems, as well as to smaller-scale applications in cars and medical devices.
Demand for and uses of cyber-physical systems are growing worldwide. Where we are now: Federal investment in embedded computing,
networking, and control has been relatively limited over the past two decades. Computing was once a minimal component of engineered
systems, and systems were designed to be operated separately and in benign or controlled environments. Now the “cyber” aspects
of engineered systems and products are becoming the very key to making these systems more capable. And the need for deployment
is increasingly in situations where systems must be designed to interact and cooperate, often with high degrees of autonomy.
This is illustrated in the rapidly growing demand for increased capability in transportation (e.g., safe routing, collision
avoidance), manufacturing (precision control, using new – even cyber-physical – materials), agriculture and mining (robotics),
and medical diagnosis and therapies (implanted sensors and actuators). Society benefits when surgery can become less invasive,
reducing recovery times. Advances in computer-controlled robotic and laser surgery (such as those enabled by the daVinci medical
robotic system) are in this direction. The U.S. industrial economy has depended upon the productivity of its workforce – enabled
by its technological capability – for relative U.S. strength in industrial sectors worldwide. That lead has declined as other
nations have rapidly joined the technology race and have sought to produce ever more sophisticated products and systems. Research
needs: The next Industrial Revolution will be one of cyber-physical systems. A new systems science is needed to provide unified
foundations, models and tools, system capabilities, and architectures that enable innovation in highly dependable cyber-enabled
engineered and natural systems. Better understanding of system complexity is also necessary in this research area to aid in
improved management and decision support. Specific technical areas for emphasis include: * Unifying foundations for modeling,
predicting, and controlling systems that exhibit combined cyber (logical/discrete/digital) and physical (continuous/analog)
system behaviors * New approaches for supervisory control of systems that must interact on an ad hoc basis. * Scientific and
engineering principles, metrics, and standards that integrate the disciplines of real-time embedded systems, control, communications/networking,
security, human-machine interaction * Technology to close the design and productivity gap between modeling, programming, and
runtime execution of cyber-physical systems * Principles for reasoning about and actively managing properties of complex,
multiscale, realtime cyber-physical system interactions, including: safety, security, reliability, performance. * Design methods
and systems technology for autonomy, human interaction, and management of control authority * Open systems approaches for
composition, integration, and coordination of cyber-physical systems
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