A prototype architecture for cyber-physical systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is an exciting emerging research area that has drawn the attention of many researchers. Although the question of "What is a CPS?" remains open, widely recognized and accepted attributes of a CPS include timeliness, distributed, reliability, fault-tolerance, security, scalability and autonomous. In this paper, a CPS definition is given and a prototype architecture is proposed. It is argued that this architecture captures the essential attributes of a CPS and lead to identification of many research challenges.