tufts university school of engineering tufts wireless laboratory twl direction almir davis...

Tufts UniversitySchool Of Engineering

Tufts Wireless Laboratory

TWL Direction

Almir Davis

09/28/2009 1



AGENDA

• TWL Organization

• TWL Present (Wireless Sensor Networks)• TWL Future Direction (Cyber Physical Systems)

• CAS Paper: Edward Lee “Cyber Physical Systems: Design Challenges”

09/28/2009 2



TWL Organization

• Established 2 years ago

• Have defined management structure

• Meeting room and website are available

• Meetings on a regular weekly basis

• Membership: varies from year to year (currently ~5 regular members)

09/28/2009 3



TWL Organization – To Do List• Define the new technical area focus (CAS)• Push senior/PH.D. members of the lab to define

their project directions so that junior members can help out by digging deep into some aspects of those projects

• Maintain the website and make sure all the intern presentations use TWL PowerP. template

• Extend the alliance with Microsoft09/28/2009 4



TWL Organization – To Do List• Continue attracting new members once the

attractive projects are defined and put in motion• keep regular meeting schedule, meeting notes• Keep an active spreadsheet (make it available

online) of all papers read (date, name, key conclusions)

• Have some pizza available for meetings

09/28/2009 5



TWL Present

• Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN)– Read number of papers/publications– Possess knowledge in key WSN issues– Capable to develop real Tufts WSN platforms

using TI WSN sensor kit– Have current students doing there graduate

work in WSN09/28/2009 6



TWL Future (part 1)• Cyber Physical Systems

– Gain knowledge and expertise by reading papers/publications (as many as possible)

– Share the knowledge among group members by presenting at least 1 paper per week (full time students maybe 2)

– Find a focus in the area that is large enough to allow multi-student involvement

09/28/2009 7



TWL Future (part 2)• Cyber Physical Systems

– Once the projects are established ask individuals to hand in a detailed task schedule with major trackable milestone

– Prof. Chang to approve the schedules and track the progress accordingly

09/28/2009 8



E. Lee: “Cyber Physical Systems: Design Challenges”(1)• Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are integrations of

computation and physical processes

• The economic and social potential of CPS systems is vastly greater than what has been realized, and major investments are being made worldwide to develop the technology

• There are considerable challenges, particularly because the physical components of such systems introduce safety and reliability requirements qualitatively different from those in general purpose computing.

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Potential Fields• high confidence medical devices and systems, • assisted living, • Traffic control and safety,• advanced automotive systems, • Process control, • energy conservation, • environmental control, • avionics, instrumentation, critical infrastructure control • distributed robotics (telepresence, telemedicine),• defense systems, manufacturing,• smart structures.

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Requirements

• Reliability• Predictability• Timing certainty• Concurrency• System understanding

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Background• Comparison with embedded system

– inadequate due to CAS’s much larger scope– System flat bench scaled toward smaller systems

• Aging (“Evidently, efficiency is nearly irrelevant compared to predictability, and predictability is difficult to achieve without freezing the design at the physical level”)

09/28/2009 12



Background (1)• Time synchronization across networks

– (“The most widely used networking techniques today introduce a great deal of timing variability and stochastic behavior.”)

• Concurrency of embedded systems – (“embedded systems must react to multiple real-time streams of sensor

information and control multiple actuators concurrently”)

09/28/2009 13



Background (2)• Time synchronization across networks

– (“The most widely used networking techniques today introduce a great deal of timing variability and stochastic behavior.”)

• Concurrency of embedded systems– (“embedded systems must react to multiple real-time streams of sensor

information and control multiple actuators concurrently”)

09/28/2009 14



Solutions (1)• New computing concepts needed

– (“Advances in formal simulation, emulation and verification will help but won’t be enough”)

• Predictable models – (“Instead of starting with a highly nondeterministic mechanism like threads, and

relying on the programmer to prune that nondeterminacy, we should start with deterministic, composable mechanisms, and introduce nondeterminism only where needed”)

• Timing precision – (“possible if we are willing to sacrifice performance”)

09/28/2009 15



Solutions (2)• Reflect behavioral properties in interfaces

– (“ability to develop and compose specialized “interface theories”)

• Coordination Language – (“introduce new semantics at the component interaction level rather

than at the programming language level”)

09/28/2009 16

tufts university school of engineering tufts wireless laboratory twl direction almir davis...

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