Cyber-Physical Systems (330777)

The grant focuses on advancing Cyber-physical systems (CPS), which integrate computation and physical components to achieve advanced levels of capability, adaptability, scalability, resiliency, safety, security, and usability. The program aims to drive innovation and competition across various domains such as agriculture, aeronautics, building design, civil infrastructure, energy, environmental quality, healthcare, manufacturing, and transportation, through the development of CPS technologies. These technologies are becoming increasingly data-rich, leading to new degrees of automation and autonomy. The program encourages the integration of artificial intelligence with CPS, particularly for real-time operations, opening new research opportunities with significant societal implications. The initiative seeks to accelerate fundamental research to keep pace with the innovation demand across application domains, challenging traditional CPS research ideas with new concepts emerging from artificial intelligence and machine learning. It supports the core research necessary to engineer complex CPS, which may require dependable, high-confidence, or provable behaviors in areas like control, data analytics, machine learning, autonomy, networking, and security. The program emphasizes the development of methods, tools, and components based on cross-cutting principles and encourages the validation of these principles through prototypes and testbeds. It fosters a research community dedicated to advancing education, outreach in CPS, and accelerating the transition of research into real-world applications. Proposals for both small and medium projects are supported, focusing on innovative ideas or multi-disciplinary projects with clear, integrated goals.