Designing Self-managing Cyber-physical Systems using Model based Techniques

The increasing heterogeneity and uncertainty of emerging cyber physical systems imply that an application must be able to detect and adapt to changes in its state, its requirements, and operating conditions to meet its desired performance and constraints in real-time. As system and application scales increase, ad hoc heuristic-based approaches to application adaptation and management quickly become insufficient. To cope with this complexity, it is desirable for such systems to become largely autonomic, i.e., be capable of managing themselves, given high-level objectives from systems engineers, users, and administrators. To this end, this presentation introduces a model-based control technology for systematic design of self-managing cyber-physical systems. In this framework, management problems of interest such as self-configuration, self-healing, and self-protection are posed as one of sequential and discrete optimization under uncertainty. Relevant parameters of the operating environment are estimated and used by the system model to forecast future application behavior over a prediction horizon to adapt accordingly. The presentation introduces several practical implementations of this technology and discusses future extensions and related research.

Dr. Sherif Abdelwahed

Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University on June 2, 2021 at 12:00 PM in Zoom Webinar
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Sherif Abdelwahed is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), where he teaches and conducts research in the area of computer engineering, with specific interests in autonomic computing, cyber-physical systems, formal verification and cyber-security. Before joining VCU in August 2017, he served as the associate director of the Distributed Analytics and Security Institute at Mississippi State University (MSU). He was also is also an Associate Professor in the ECE Department at MSU. He received his Ph.D. in 2002 from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. Throughout his academic tenure, Dr. Abdelwahed pioneered work on model-based design of autonomic computing systems and self-managing systems using control-theoretic techniques and model-integrated computing concepts. His research interests also include Cyber security and model-based self-protection, design and analysis of cyber-physical systems, fault diagnosis, modeling and analysis of discrete-event and hybrid systems, and formal verification. Dr. Abdelwahed has chaired several international conferences and conference tracks, and has served as technical committee member at various national and international conferences. He received the StatePride Faculty award for 2010 and 2011, the Bagley College of Engineering Hearin Faculty Excellence award in 2010, and recently the 2016 Faculty Research Award from the Bagley College of Engineering at MSU. He has more than 180 publications and is a senior member of the IEEE.

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