Specification, Modeling, and Analysis

Cyber-physical systems are intrinsically concurrent. At a minimum, the cyber and the physical subsystems coexist in time, but even within these subsystems, concurrent processes are common. Models of concurrency in the physical world (coexisting physical dynamics in a time continuum) are very different from models of concurrency in software (arbitrary interleaving of sequences of atomic actions), and very different from models of concurrency in networks (asynchronous, partially-ordered discrete actions or clock-driven time slots). Reconciling these divergent models of concurrency, and ensuring interoperability and communication between components that have divergent models of concurrency, is a central problem in CPS.