• Published on 17 Mar 2015
• External News

CPS are the backbone of Industry 4.0

“CPS are the backbone of Industry 4.0” stated Dr Ing Herbert Zeisel representing the German Ministry of Education and Research in his welcome speech at the Co Summit.

“CPS are key for process automation” stated Khalil Rouhana representing the EC.

“CPs are key to the future requirements of all sectors” stated Dr Heinrich Daembkes, president of ARTEMIS-IA, in the theme speech.

It was good to hear all those statements, as I also think that CyberPhysical Systems, CPS for short, are one of the most the important systems that will enable the Smart World. So when ARTEMIS-IA asked for a proposal for a speakers corner I immediately CPS come up as a good and interesting topic.  So I made some inquiries for speakers in my network and was able to present a programme of interesting speakers. Prof Rodolfo from UPM covered the scientific challenges of CPS and Patrick Pype (NXP), Zoltan Papp (TNO) and Casper Garros and Ronald Begeer (Philips) covered each an application area to outline the business opportunities.

When I went to the conference for the start of the Speakers Orange (a very appropriate colour with a Dutch chairman) I was a little bit anxious. How many were attending? To my surprise the room was completely filled and people had even to stand.  So that was a good start.

In his presentation Rodolfo limited himself to Modelling, Control and Verification and gave a concise overview of the developments in the last 10 years outlining the approach and progress in the USA and Europe.  During the debate after the presentation his claim that the USA many years ahead, because a CPS workshop was already organized in 2006 was disputed.  Some argued that in the USA the term CPS was adopted earlier, but that in fact in Europe at that time were working on the topic but no using the term. This reminded me to my visit to UCLA were a UCLA professor remarked that after working for more than 10 years on intelligent networks it was necessary to have a new name to seduce the NSA to fund research on intelligent networks. Another observation that led to discussion was Habers statement that the EC in the LEIT-ICT the focus is on fundamental research rather than on industrial impact as is the policy of the EC in Horizon.  One person in the audience invited him to visit his booth to show that he was wrong.  From personal experience I intend to agree with Haber. A cybersecurity proposal I submitted with the top 3 industrial players was not funded.  Nonetheless, as the referee is always right in football, likewise in the EC the reviewer is always right.

Patrick Pype took us on a journey to the future of Automated Driving with a focus on secure connectivity. He presented a number of trends that impact on automated driving in the future.  He showed that CPS is key technology to interconnect all systems in the car and to provide the necessary connections with other cars and the infrastructure.  He also showed that the number of attacks on connected devices is increasing massively. So security devices have to prevent that cars will be hacked. Imagine what could happen, if you are driving autonomously with 150 km / hours on the Autobahn and the car gets hacked.  Patrick wanted to finish his presentation with a video. Here we came down to Earth.  Because of the limited bandwidth of the network it was not possible to play the video smoothly.

Zoltan Papp took us on a tour through the Smart City. According to the forecasts the Smart City will be a booming market with an estimated size of around $ 1.8 trillion.  However, first a couple of technical obstacles have to be tackled with. In the Smart City different smart domains will be present that to interact with each other: a kind of ultimate challenge for CPS. In addition to the technical obstacles business challenges have to be met. The costs of the Smart City are more or less easy to calculate; however, the benefits are more difficult to quantify. So the question arises how is to pay for the deployment of the Smart City, who is going to maintain and to operate the Smart City. How about the societal acceptance of the Smart City? Open questions we have to deal with before the Smart City will be there.

Finally Casper Garros and Ronald Begeer presented us the future of Healthcare.  We are living longer, we are living more unhealthy and we want to stay on our own longer.  Our politicians want to reduce the cost of the care system. How to deal with that?  First we need a paradigm shift: “earning money by keeping you healthy instead of earning money by keeping you in hospital”.  Next, according to Philips those contradictory requirements can met by a holistic approach: the healthcare system consists of a chain of links: from healthy living, prevention …to Home care. By cleverly linking using CPS this chain can be realized with reduced cost. The Philips instantiation is the Healthsuite Digital Platform. To function properly all the medical data of the patient have to be stored in the platform. So after the presentation there was a lively discussion whether such a system would be accepted. In the Netherlands the s.o called Electronic Patient File proposed by the Dutch government did not pass parliament, because of concerns that the system would intrude the personal live space.

Summarizing the speakers corner was a success and gave a good overview of the status of the CPS landscape