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

Project Information

Sustainable-CPS

Grant agreement ID: 882550

DOI

10.3030/882550

Project closed

EC signature date 4 March 2020

Start date 1 September 2021

End date 29 April 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 190 559,04

EU contribution

€ 190 559,04

Coordinated by

UPPSALA UNIVERSITET
Sweden

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Sustainable-CPS (Designing Human-centered Sustainable Cyber-physical Systems of the Future)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2023-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Problem definition: Cyber-physical systems (CPS),“system that includes integrations of computation, networking, and physical processes with feedback loops where physical processes affect computations and vice versa” has the potential to dwarf the 20th-century information technologies revolution. 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 (vehicles, drones), 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 to these new characteristics are intelligence, autonomy, connectivity, collaboration and similar. 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.
While CPS are seen as promising advancements to tackle societal and technical challenges, the current engineering practices related to design and development of CPS do not aim to directly target sustainability concerns. The limited theory that exists today is unable to support the level of complexity, scalability, security, safety, interoperability, and flexible design and operation that will be required to meet future needs. In consequence, innovative engineering frameworks, environments, knowledge, and tools for realizing novel CPS and services are needed to make these systems sustainable, ethical, understandable, extendable, successful, safe and useful. The Sustainable-CPS project addresses this need.

Importance for society:
CPS are increasingly common in our industries as a form of manufacturing/robotics/maintenance systems, in our life as transportation/infrastructure/communication systems, or in our homes as smart products. Sustainability of these system has the potential to improve the energy consumption, and environmental effects, support the life quality of the citizens and contribute better manufacturing production and similar industrial processes which will in turn provide better work environments and life standards.

Overall objectives:
• RO1) to identify the future properties of CPS and their effect on sustainability indicators
• RO2) to evaluate and blend future studies, design thinking and systems thinking for improving the future CPS
• RO3) to develop and adapt a framework for guiding innovative, sustainable and human-centered solutions for future CPS
• RO4) to evaluate and validate the applicability of the interdisciplinary framework and a toolkit for designing future human-centered sustainable CPS

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Explanation on related work packages:
WP1-Project Management and Education (M1-M24): The main purpose of the work package is to ensure the success of the project, education and career development.
WP2-Review and Characterization (M1-M6): The second work package starts with a systematic literature review in a recursive manner where the ER will define a protocol to follow to identify the future characteristics of the CPS and sustainability indicators.
WP3-Framework Development (M6-M13): The goal of WP3 was to review and evaluate different tools from future thinking, design thinking and systems thinking .
WP4-Framework Evaluation (M9-M24): This work package focuses on the evaluation of the framework. We planned and facilitated a workshop to evaluate the framework.
WP5-Dissemination, Exploitation and Communication (M1-M24): This work package is designed for the effective communication of the results.

I have published several articles:
- Gürdür Broo, D., Gellers, J. C., & Sætra, H. S. (2024) Cultivating Ecocentric Machines: Changing the Direction of the Anthropocentric Lineage in Intelligent Machines. 7th Industrial Cyber-physical Systems Conference 2024, St. Louis, MO, USA.
- Gürdür Broo, D., Gellers, J. C., & Sætra, H. S. (2024) Re-Imagining Intelligent Machines in an Anthropocentric–Ecocentric Continuum: The Case for Ecocentric Intelligent Machines. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4545519
- Gürdür Broo, D., Bravo-Haro, M., & Schooling, J. (2022). Design and implementation of a smart infrastructure digital twin. Automation in construction, 136, 104171. https://doi.org/10.3390/technologies10060120
- Makri, C., Gürdür Broo, D., & Neely, A. (2022). Human-in-Loop Decision-Making and Autonomy: Lessons Learnt from the Aviation Industry Transferred to Cyber-Physical Systems. Technologies, 10(6), 120.
- Gürdür Broo, O. Kaynak and S. M. Sait (2022). Engineering Education at the Age of Industry 5.0. Journal of Industrial Information Integration, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jii.2021.100311.
- Gürdür Broo, (2022). Transdisciplinarity and Three Mindsets for Sustainability in the Age of Cyber-physical Systems,” Journal of Industrial Information Integration, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jii.2021.100290.
- Gürdür Broo, and J. Schooling, (2022). Design and implementation of a smart infrastructure digital twin, Automation in Construction, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.autcon.2022.104171.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Progress beyond the state of the art: The sustainability of CPS is not very well studied and the contributions of this project are extending the state of the art. The innovative framework guides different stakeholders on how to design these systems in a more sustainable way where human-centered design is at the center of this design process. This is done by merging design thinking, systems thinking, and future studies which is also another contribution to the state of the art. Even though all three are well studied these three mindsets are not used together before, especially to deal with cyber-physical systems.

Expected results: Expected results of the project will be the outputs as form of published scientific articles, the final version of the framework and workshops where the framework is shared with the stakeholders.

Potential impacts:
The project's overall objective is to develop a sustainability-oriented, human-centric framework for designing future cyber-physical systems. The project, ultimately, aims to aid industry and academia to understand the relationship between autonomy, intelligence, and connectivity and their effects on the design processes, to illustrate the shortcomings of today’s traditional engineering practices, and equip them with an innovative framework and a set of tools to build human-centered sustainable CPS.
This framework and its usage to design future CPS have the potential to improve the sustainability of these systems. Since they already exist in small and big sizes in our industries, workplaces and even homes, their sustainable design on a large scale will affect economic, environmental, and social sustainability.

Framework