This week NIST held a workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) testbeds. While the development of CPS testbeds is still in the early stages, this workshop was presented as an opportunity to bring a diverse spectrum of the CPS and testbed communities together, to talk about key capabilities that CPS testbeds should have and the design principles that make them possible.

Representatives from energy systems, aerospace, defense, medical and manufacturing disciplines were in attendance. One of the discussion focal points, in terms of capabilities, was how to accomplish federation in an environment where the testbeds may be highly heterogeneous. We came to the conclusion that this capability alone presents design principle challenges in the modeling, resource allocation, orchestration and interaction space that are quite new and unique to CPS testbeds. Designing a testbed architecture that can support experimentation across disparate models, simulation technologies, physical devices and specialized hardware presents interesting challenges for testbed and infrastructure designers.

There were several researchers in attendance who have implemented substantial CPS testbed systems and provided valuable insight and context to our discussions. There will be a report coming out in the next few weeks that documents in detail the outcome of the workshop. This workshop was particularly encouraging for the future of DeterLab in the CPS space. DETER is well positioned to take a leadership role in the network-based distributed control arena of CPS testbed research and development.

Information on the workshop can be found at:  http://www.nist.gov/cps/cyber-physical-systems-testbed-workshop.cfm