Cyber-physical operating systems — What are the right abstractions?

While the future importance of cyber-physical systems is widely acknowledged, there is surprisingly rare discussion about the design of operating systems for these kinds of systems. We present an extended view on the low-level abstractions to be offered by the operating system to applications. The central idea is the treatment of all relevant cyber-physical entities as task execution resource, which directly impacts the representation of tasks, communication and memory in the application programming interface. The resulting concept framework can serve as starting point for future research in this field.