Temporal Issues in Cyber-Physical Systems

This paper reviews the use of time, clocks, and clock synchronization protocols in cyber-physical systems (CPS). Recent advances in the area of timing suggest avenues of research and potential new application areas. We discuss how introducing timestamps and clocks can help overcome issues such as latency, jitter, and determining correct execution order. Furthermore, we show how system complexity can be reduced and distribution as well as parallelism can be done deterministically. We also point to recent work in raising time to first class citizen status in modeling and implementation. In particular, we describe design and execution environments of CPS and specialized hardware such as predictable timing architectures where time plays a key role.