Context-Aware Design of Cyber-Physical Human Systems (CPHS)

Recently, it has been widely accepted by the research community that interactions between humans and cyber-physical infrastructures have played a significant role in determining the performance of the latter. The existing paradigm for designing cyber-physical systems for optimal performance focuses on developing models based on historical data. The impacts of context factors driving human system interaction are challenging and are difficult to capture and replicate in existing design models. As a result, many existing models do not or only partially address those context factors of a new design owing to the lack of capabilities to capture the context factors. This limitation in many existing models often causes performance gaps between predicted and measured results. We envision a new design environment, a cyber-physical human system (CPHS) where decision-making processes for physical infrastructures under design are intelligently connected to distributed resources over cyberinfrastructure such as experiments on design features and empirical evidence from operations of existing instances. The framework combines existing design models with context-aware design-specific data involving human-infrastructure interactions in new designs, using a machine learning approach to create augmented design models with improved predictive powers.Comment: Paper was accepted at the 12th International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS 2020

A design framework for cyber-physical-human-systems

Cyber-physical-human systems (CPHS) represent significant extensions of cyber-physical systems (CPS) to include aspects of human interactions and usage. A class of CPHS of interest here is smart products that offer services to their customers, supported by back-end systems (e.g., information, finance) and other infrastructure. We argue that although the domain of CPS relies on engineering and computer science as its foundations, the emerging field of CPHS does not have an underlying scientific foundation. Transdisciplinary teams of researchers are needed to integrate the engineering, computing, and human behavioral fields that are central to CPHS to develop new foundational theory and methodology. Furthermore, a new design methodology is needed for CPHS, given the transdisciplinary nature of the field, that anticipates human acceptability and usability considerations as well as emerging behaviors that result from human-system interactions. In this paper, we propose a framework for such a design methodology. The domain of assistive and rehabilitation technology is used in this paper to provide an example field of practice that could benefit from a systematic design methodology. A CPHS design example is provided to illustrate the application of the methodology framework