Cyber Physical Systems for Industry 4.0: Control Of and Over Wireless Networks

Speaker:
Prof. Anurag Kumar, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

Abstract:
Although the term Cyber Physical Systems (shortened as CPS) was coined in 2006, the concept has been around for several decades, in the form of SCADA. In the recent years, the CPS concept has extended from the control of individual machines or plants to the control of entire cities (socio-technical systems), large factories, or even large warehouses. Since wires cannot be laid everywhere, especially to vehicles and people, it became necessary to build cyber physical systems in which the sensors, and the actuators (embedded in the physical domain) are interconnected by wireless networking. Thus, practical implementations of Cyber Physical Systems, for example, in support of the Industry 4.0 vision, will typically involve substantial wireless networking, due to ease of deployment, retrofitting, expansion, and reconfiguration.

In this talk, we will first provide a high-level overview of the concept of Cyber Physical Systems, and the role they are expected to play in the modern industry, under the Industry 4.0 vision. Unlike the in-building wireless networks for Internet access, IoT networks for Industrial CPS applications will need to be designed for providing quality of service, depending on the application. This requires control of the wireless network. Further, the inference and control algorithms that run over these wireless networks (in support of the Cyber Physical System) will need to be designed keeping in mind the nonidealities of the wireless communication network.  This requires the study of designing algorithms over a wireless network. We will provide glimpses of some recent research issues by explaining some examples from our work and the literature.

Speaker bio:
Prof. Anurag Kumar (B. Tech (1988) Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, PhD (1981) Cornell Univ.) was a Member of Technical Staff in AT&T Bell Laboratories (1981-1988), before returning to India and joining the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) as a faculty member in the ECE Department. He was the Director of the Institute during 2014-2020, and now, after superannuation, he is an Honorary Professor. He has published extensively in the areas of communications networking and distributed systems, and has coauthored two internationally adopted textbooks in communication networking and wireless networking. He was awarded the 1977 President’s Gold Medal by IIT Kanpur. He received the IISc Alumni Award for Excellence in Engineering Research for 2008, and the IEI-IEEE Award for Engineering Excellence 2017. He has been elected Fellow of the IEEE, the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), the Indian Academy of Science (IASc), and The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS). During the period 2005-2009, he was an area editor for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and was then on its steering committee from 2010-2014.  He is a recipient of the J.C. Bose National Fellowship, awarded by the Department of Science Technology, for the period 2011-2021.