Developing A First Course on Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

Effective and creative cyber-physical systems (CPS) development requires expertise in disparate fields that have traditionally been taught in several distinct disciplines. At the same time, students seeking a CPS education generally come from diverse educational backgrounds. In this paper, we report on our recent experience developing and teaching a course on CPS. The course addresses the following three questions: What are the core elements of CPS? How should these core concepts be integrated in the CPS design process? What types of modeling tools can assist in the design of cyber-physical systems? Our experience with the first three offerings of the course has been positive overall. We also discuss the lessons we learned from some issues that were not handled well. All material including lecture notes and software used for the course are openly available online.