Led by Dr David Boyle, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

We are interested in the missing scientific and engineering principles, methods and tools to build the computing systems that will monitor and control physical systems in the future. These physical systems include many elements of our critical infrastructure, such as civil engineering structures, transport, water and energy. Therefore, the computing systems that monitor and control these physical systems and processes must be trustworthy, reliable, resilient and cost effective – and such guarantees must be inherent by design.

There is currently no way to design or reason about such systems in a principled, systematic and holistic way. We seek to understand and formalise the various design dimensions such that the trade-off space can be better managed for future cyber-physical systems, particularly where elements may be optimised for specific application contexts taking into account their unique constraints (e.g. energy harvesting opportunities, communications barriers, complexity, development time, cost, etc.).