Thinking embedded, designing cyber-physical: Is it possible?

Abstract

Computers are getting smaller and their capabilities increase incredibly. However, even today computing includes human control to enter data and interpret the results. Even for modern systems like transportation, healthcare and similar safety critical missions require human control to ensure the safety of human life. As a result of the increase in complexity, it has been getting harder to manage these systems just by humans for every possible case. For example railway signalization is already very complex and hard task to handle just by human capabilities. Huge number of variables in such an equation needs intelligent systems which can also control physical world in addition to data acquisition and report. Conventional control systems programmed for specific tasks, are unable to adapt themselves to changing conditions and environments. Therefore less control on physical world conditions due to this insufficient intelligence capacity makes them unusable.