At the beginning of June, the Control & Automation TPN held an event on the subject of Opportunities and Challenges for Cyber-Physical System Design.   More than 30 delegates attended this technical event, which included two presentations - giving both an academic and industrial perspective.  



The speakers were Dr Eric Kerrigan, who is a Reader in Control Engineering and Optimization at Imperial College London, where he has a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering as well as the Department of Aeronautics, and Dr Andy Chang, National Instruments.    Dr Chang is a senior manager for academic research at National Instruments in Austin, Texas. He is currently a PhD candidate in the department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin.



Delegates learned that the main technical problem in cyber-physical system design is how best to merge abstractions from physics with computer science: the study of physical systems is based on differential equations, continuous mathematics and analogue data, whereas the study of computing systems is based on logical operations, discrete mathematics and digital data. 



Many researchers, particularly from the automation and control community, have been working on some of these problems for a number of decades, however,  computing is still young and we are yet to realize its full potential in most application areas. In order to address this, the first part of the evening included a selection of open problems that need to be solved in order for cyber-physical system design to become more of a science and less of an art.



After the presentations, delegates were able to network and feedback after the event was very positive, and included:



"A brilliant lecture and presentation into the world cyber physical systems. Thoroughly enjoyed!"



"Good event. Very engaging lecture by both speakers. Really felt connected with the theme of the lectures"



"Interesting & informative. Presentations were excellent"



If you weren’t able to get to the event, you can see both presentations on our IET.tv channel