Cyber-physical systems: Providing Quality of Service (QoS) in a heterogeneous systems-of-systems environment

The very recent development of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) provides a smart infrastructure for connecting abstract computational artifacts with the physical world. As new CPS applications start to interact with the physical world using sensors and actuators, there is a great need for ensuring that the actions initiated by the CPS is timely. This will require new Quality of Service (QoS) functionality and mechanisms for CPS. This paper will investigate QoS requirements for CPS and discuss the state of the art in CPS QoS techniques and models. Research challenges to providing QoS for CPS will be discussed and a new CPS framework that provides end-to-end QoS in a complex system-of-systems CPS will be presented. Two case studies, in smart energy grids and intelligent vehicle systems, will be provided to clearly illustrate the QoS requirements in CPS and how it can be achieved.