Designing Human-centered Sustainable Cyber-physical Systems of the Future

ended

This proposal presents the research idea of an experienced researcher (ER), Didem Gürdür Broo, which is called “Designing Human-centered Sustainable Cyber-physical Systems of the Future” (Sustainable-CPS). The project is designed as a research training fellowship between KTH, Royal Institute of Technology (beneficiary for m1-m12), Uppsala University (beneficiary for m13-m24) located in Sweden and Stanford University (partner organization) located in the United States of America. Didem Gürdür Broo invited to work in Professor Leifer’s designX research lab at Stanford University. ER wants to initially work with the research group at Stanford for a year to develop a framework through small case studies and observations and then come back to Sweden to introduce and evaluate the framework through workshops. Today, CPS exist everywhere in different sizes, with different functionalities and capabilities. Some examples can be listed as smart cities, industry 4.0 applications, internet of things, autonomous systems, intelligent transport systems and so on. Several characteristics of these systems are new and these new properties push the limits of traditional engineering practices. Some examples of these new characteristics are intelligence, autonomy, connectivity, and collaboration. Moreover, today’s engineering education and practices are preliminarily concentrating to solve technical problems related to these systems and, unfortunately, do not include sustainability and social implications perspective as default. Sustainable-CPS project aims to use interactive, collaborative, and innovative tools from design thinking, systems thinking and future studies to develop a framework and a toolkit to support the design of future CPS by primarily focusing on human needs, social implications and sustainability.