Cyber-physical systems such as autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles, smart buildings and grid, industrial robots, and healthcare systems, are poised to bring immense economic and societal benefits. However, the design and operation of these systems faces tremendous challenges from the rapid increase of system scale and complexity, the close interaction with dynamic environment and human activities, the employment of multicore and distributed architectural platforms, and the stringent and often conflicting requirements on various system metrics. Many of these challenges center around three key factors – timing, security, and heterogeneity.

In this talk, I will discuss the unique timing, security and heterogeneity challenges of cyber-physical systems, and introduce our work in tackling them with design automation techniques. These include 1) a timing-driven software synthesis framework that automatically explores the large software design space and addresses timing-related metrics such as schedulability, security, performance and fault tolerance; 2) cross-layer co-design and co-management methods that bridge different system layers (control, software, hardware), integrate heterogeneous components, and trade off multiple metrics; and 3) applications of our approaches in creating efficient, reliable and secure automotive, transportation, and building automation systems. I will also discuss some of our future directions, such as addressing timing attacks in CPS and conducting extensibility-driven CPS design.