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Freight handling operations spend a lot of money to obtain the required picture, dimension and weight data for every piece of cargo they move. But their data transmission systems for tracking this information is either outdated or expensive. With the International Maritime Organization’s new Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) mandates starting in July 2016, verifying the exact weight of cargo is more important than ever.

UT ECE Professor Andreas Gerstlauer has been awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for research on "Network-Level Design of Cyber-Physical Systems." Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are computer systems that are deeply embedded into their environment to continuously sense, act and interact with the physical world. A large part of the CPS promise in application areas such as healthcare, transportation or energy comes from networking of such deeply embedded, physically distributed devices. However, this also comes with fundamentally new design challenges.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) promise great advances to society in fields such as transportation and healthcare. CPS are computer systems that interact directly with the physical world, such as in robotics or self-driving cars. The challenge, according to WNCG Prof. Andreas Gerstlauer, is these systems must operate within tight constraints imposed by their physical environment. They must be able to complete tasks on time and with minimal overhead in a real-world environment.