Cyber-Physical Systems

Solutions to Pandemic Challenges

Tushar Semwal, Faiz Iqbal, Tushar Semwal, Faiz Iqbal

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000562644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatica
• Subtopic: Architettura di sistemi

A Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is an integration of cyber components with their physical counterparts. A cyber unit could be either a software or hardware. Physical components are those objects, which are governed by the law of physics. CPS have transformed how we interact with the physical world, ranging from sensing the environmental parameters to controlling a complex manufacturing industry.

The current pandemic has had catastrophic implications people all across the world in terms of health and economy. This book presents the significance and practicality of CPS in a pandemic situation. It provides a strong foundation to the CPS while also incorporating the latest theoretical advances and practical applications to alleviate the state of a pandemic. The book covers…

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• Theoretical background and application-oriented overview of the different CPS models

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• Impact of COVID-19 and similar pandemics on the engineering aspects of various industries and organisations

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• Exciting and impactful CPS based solutions to the different pandemic situations

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• Security and privacy in CPS when applied to critical and sensitive pandemic affected environment

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• Describes the government-funded projects and work using CPS in real-world scenarios

The book provides a unique and fresh exposure to CPS employed in a pandemic situation. It brings together researchers, practitioners, academics, experts, and industry professionals from around the world to share their knowledge and experience.

CHAPTER 1 Introduction to Cyber-Physical Systems and Challenges Faced due to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Faiz Iqbal, Jitin Malhotra, Sunil Jha and Tushar Semwal*

* Corresponding author: [email protected]

1. Introduction

The economic world has been affected over all its sectors due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It is a health crisis that has defined the situation in the health sector. However, the health sector is not the only affected sectorial entity due to this pandemic. With its unprecedented effect across all dimensions the pandemic has become a worldwide crisis in all forms of social and economic reforms delivering potentially everlasting effects on each and every country it has its presence on. The pandemic also brought scaled organizational modifications in almost all aspects of life forcing enterprises both private and government to adapt to the new normal. Governments were and still are tasked at saving lives at the cost of a lot of other things and a balance must be found. The balance meant restrictions at various levels for businesses which led to financial problems amounting to a cosmic scale and with challenges to create conditions safe for everyone. Work from home for the vast majority of companies became the new normal as employees were asked to stay home and hone a new set of skills to deal with digital platforms on top of their own skills. Despite the best efforts from many companies to keep employee health and wellbeing a top priority the conditions are just not desirable and leading to frustrated moods. With this being a global crisis, the effects of COVID-19 are being felt across many industrial sectors. None of the companies worldwide have a proven strategy for this extremely rare and new nature of working conditions. Every company has had to individually fight the pandemic challenges they are in front of in these difficult times.

The concept of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) started as an industry development strategy for economies around the world at the end of the first decade of this twenty-first century. From an economic point of view, industry acts as the growth engine for every country. Technological development of various aspects including production has been extremely rapid of late, and very recently having been coupled with digital advancements it has enabled the creation of cyber-physical systems (CPS). The cyber part of CPS is able to deal with the physical processes through the use of advanced sensors, sophisticated controllers, and interactive user interfaces, enabling the use of cyber worlds to manipulate physical standalone systems remotely, reliably, and in real-time. Tasks such as communication, computing, control, and self-maintenance are feasible with the advent of CPS. Industry 4.0 has been looked upon as a medium to enhance production rates and competitive strategies. From its conception in 2010-2011 until the present it is a big challenge for many industries around the world.

The COVID-19 pandemic in the beginning led to the cessation of work in almost all industries. Especially in the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and micro-SMEs, reduced production efficiency further aggravated scarcity of various essential products as well. The number of SMEs is large and dominant in the current market. These types of enterprises usually work with a traditional work force and lack the latest advancements of I4.0 knowledge and skills. Therefore, owing to their lack of intelligence within this domain, primarily all the work is still dominated by manual interventions. The pandemic introduced the sudden and unexpected shortage of manual labour and enterprises could not come up with solutions to these pandemic challenges in the short term. With the advancements of I4.0 it was already becoming essential for SMEs to develop, change and adapt to the new regime of less humans and more automation. Simultaneously, the COVID-19 pandemic meant that the same change are now even more vital to survival of these small entities viz. micro, small, and medium scale enterprises. This, transforming the existing micro-SMEs into I4.0 compliant enterprises has also become a pandemic challenge.

The pandemic has also affected the education system in a huge way and schools, colleges, universities, none have been spared. With every country looking to spend significant amounts of money and time in developing the next generation it is a very challenging and daunting task to keep the education system going. The pandemic may last for years and children’s years of education are extremely vital for their knowledge and growth and quick solutions are required to the education specific pandemic challenges. Same is the case for undergraduate and postgraduate studies especially in engineering. With their laboratories being forced to close, it is vital to bring new solutions to remote learning giving the same feel and knowledge to students to learn from and become the outstanding engineers of the future.

Supply chains (SCs) are another area that have been affected by the pandemic, although most of the activities in this domain have been rendered essential and can carry out their operations but they do not operate just by the logistics and there exists a huge workforce that makes every operation as smooth as it seems. The pandemic having affected this behind-the-scenes workforce has had its effect on SCs as well. The advancements in CPS are capable of addressing the issues faced by SCs through the implementation of I4.0 technological advancements. With the pandemic affecting many of the SC aspects there has arisen new challenges in this domain that need tackling for the supply chain world to be running in an advanced manner coping up with rapid technological challenges and the challenges the pandemic brings.

New manufacturing technologies, such as additive manufacturing (AM), are consistent in producing a versatile variety of products reliably. The performance of AM has seen drastic improvements in recent years and producing spares or replacement parts has been enabled through AM. The pandemic challenges of unprecedented demand for spares have somewhat been overcome by AM in producing new pandemic related products such as Face masks, Face shields, Swabs, and Ventilator parts. AM remains at the core of these latest advancements and also brings solutions to pandemic challenges.

With growing levels of customization, I4.0 and CPS are capable of providing solutions to the various COVID-19 Pandemic challenges few of which are listed in previous paragraphs. The following section lays out a comprehensive review of recent archival literature in CPS domain to find out how the recent work reported on CPS is still viable in a pandemic situation.

2. Cyber-Physical Systems – Recent Advancements and Technologies

The current section will introduce the readers to CPS and its related technologies. This section will present an overview of each technology to the reader with few key applications in 5 major domains (Fig. 1.1) i.e., agriculture, energy needs, healthcare, manufacturing, and transportation. These domains have been selected based on the needs of humans in difficult times like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Figure 1.1: CPS and core technologies, with applications.

2.1 Cyber Physical Systems (CPS)

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are aone of a kind, large-scale networked system, formed by uniting cyber and physical elements. They are multi-scale, spatially distributed, time-sensitive, networked systems which connect cyber elements to physical systems through sensors and actuators [1, 2]. Figure 1.2 shows a basic block diagram of the cyber-physical system having three major functional components [3]:

1. First is the cyberspace which is formed with capabilities of smart data conversion and management; data analysis & inference; and computational capabilities.
2. Second is the physical space having capabilities of real time data acquisition from physical entities, to receive feedback from the cyber world through highly advanced communication systems and implement actuation actions in the real world.
3. Third is the communication network which connects both physical and cyber spaces.

CPS term first came into existence at US National Science Foundation in 2006 [4], and from then on has gained a lot of attraction. These networked systems are of huge interest in academia, industries and even top the government priority lists because of its significant impact on society, environment and in economic sectors. In the US, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) suggested putting CPS as one of the top items of the research agenda [5]. Also, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has promoted the CPS by providing funding opportunities to the scientific community [6, 7]. Talking about European Union’s initiatives, Advanced Research and Technology for Embedded Intelligence Systems (ARTEMIS) has heavily invested in CPS with a vision of making physical systems to be smart and physically aware by connecting cyber elements to them, communicate with them and get benefited by digital information and services [8]. The EU has also launched a R&D program called Horizon 2020, with almost a budget of 80 billion euros. This program primarily targets the CPS and its related technologies to advance the research and innovation in various domains like manufacturing, agriculture, green energy, transportation, healthcare etc. [9].

Figure 1.2: CPS components.

The CPS aims to boost the realization of smart networked systems with features like accuracy, adaptability, availability, compositionality, compossibility, confidentiality, dependability, efficiency, heterogeneity, integrity, interoperability, maintainability, predictability, reliability, reconfigurability, resilience, robustness, safety, scalability, security, and sustainability [2].

CPS applications in major domains:

1. Agriculture: CPS can play a major role in creating modern and precision agriculture by collecting data about the environment like weather, soil, humidity, and climate and based on data inference which suggests what plants can be grown on land, are profitable, and are currently in demand [10]. In addition to making suggestions, it can make various predictions regarding using AI regarding the market needs based on previous knowledge and current data [11]. Livestock management can also be one of the applications which can be better managed by CPS. Various applications in agriculture are available using CPS which are smart farming [12], smart crop cutting machines, smart logistics or intelligent supply chain for crops [13], smart irrigations systems [14, 15], smart waste disposal systems, and smart biomass systems, etc.
2. Energy Needs: With technological advancements, the energy needs are also increasing day by day, which makes us think mo...