Guest Editorial Leveraging Design Automation Techniques for Cyber-Physical System Design

The research on cyber-physical systems (CPSs) addresses the close interactions between the embedded cyber components and the dynamic physical components that could involve mechanical components, energy systems, human activities, and surrounding environment. Some example CPSs include automotive systems, energy systems, robot systems, and cyber-physical biochip systems. The design of CPS involves the consideration of multiple factors such as timing, energy, reliability, fault tolerance, and security. Developing high performance CPS necessitates design automation tools, including large-scale analytical mod-eling and analysis methods, efficient simulation, synthesis and verification techniques, and methodologies for real-time data analytics and system control, etc. This special section of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN OF INTEGRATED CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS examines a number of aspects addressing the emerging CPS research problems from the design automation perspective. It serves as a stimulus to promote the highly inter-disciplinary research and development in CAD for CPS. The selected papers span a variety of CPS topics ranging from automotive, energy harvesting, and biochip to robot systems. These papers showcase how CAD approaches developed for traditional IC design problems can be adapted to handle the new CPS research challenges such as how to improve CPS security considering performance constraints and how to manage power consumption in storage-less energy harvesting systems. CAD techniques have been leveraged to optimize different metrics, including timing (efficiency), schedulabil-ity, power, reliability, and security for CPS, which can be elaborated as follows. The paper titled " Cross-Layer Codesign for Secure Cyber-Physical Systems " proposes a cross-layer design automation framework for addressing the security issues in resource-constrained CPSs. Security has become a pressing concern for CPSs due to the fact that attacks to such systems are difficult to defend due to many different attack surfaces and could lead to significant social and economic losses. The proposed framework combines control-theoretic methods with cyberse-curity techniques while optimizing performance considering timing and resource constraints. Such a codesign framework is validated using an automotive case study. The paper titled " LSCD: A Low Storage Clone Detection Protocol for Cyber-Physical Systems " addresses the communication security challenges facing wireless sensor networks of a CPS. It proposes a novel low storage clone detecting protocol for witness-based clone detection, where a network node sends its identity to witness nodes such that cloning is identified if multiple nodes at different locations share the same identity. The proposed protocol organizes witness nodes into witness routing ring paths surrounding a sink node …