A Framework for Communication–Compute–Control Co-Design in Cyber–Physical Systems

Cyber–physical systems are created at the intersection of physical processes, networking, and computation. For applications developed to implement cyber–physical interactions, in the face of limited resources, an optimization of efficiency needs to be handled across all entities—communication, computing, and control. This gives rise to the emerging area of “co-design” that addresses the challenge of designing applications or systems at the intersection of control, communication, and compute when these domains can and should no longer be considered to be fully independent. In this article a co-design framework is presented that provides a structured way of addressing the co-design problem. Different co-design degrees are specified that group application design approaches according to their needs on criticality/dependability and relate these to the knowledge, insights, and required interactions with the communication and computation infrastructure. The applicability of the framework is illustrated for the example of autonomous mobile robots, showing how different co-design degrees exploit the relationships and permit the identification of technical solutions that achieve improved resource efficiency, increased robustness, and improved performance compared to traditional application design approaches. The framework is of relevance both for concrete near-term application implementation design as well as more futuristic concept development.