A Design Framework for Evolving Cyber-Physical-Social System (CPSS) Based on Force Field

Abstract

A Cyber-Physical-Social System (CPSS), as an extension of cyber-physical system (CPS), has received considerable attention in recent years both in academia and industry. Compared to CPS, CPSS has great advantages on efficiency, adaption and robustness due to the existence of self-organizing social system. One of the difficulties in the design of CPSS is anchored in the lack of a control mechanism to achieve self-organizing capability while the system is evolving. To address this problem, we propose a design framework for evolving CPSS based on the force field, which is composed of inner force and task force field. In addition to the framework, we present several performance evaluation indicators to quantify the self-organizing capability of the system, including consumption, emergence, and scalability. We test the performance of the framework using a disaster-relief example, which involves the computational control algorithm (cyber system), robot (physical system), and self-organizing swarm (social system). The result shows that based on our framework, the system can automatically evolve from disorder to order, adapt to the changeable environment and successfully finish the task in a very efficient manner.