Symbiotic CPS Design-Space Exploration through Iterated Optimization

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are complex systems comprised of computational processes, communication networks, and elements interacting with the physical world. The design of the CPSs involves many domain-specific tools and design flows created by engineers with diverse domain knowledge. As the scale of the systems increases, the heterogeneity nature of CPS design prolongs the CPS design process, making exhaustive design-space exploration infeasible. The symbiotic design methodology, in which the designers interact with optimization tools during the design process, is therefore promising to facilitate the design process by performing design exploration in a properly restricted design space. We present a symbiotic design methodology, which explores the design space iteratively and optimizes the system by exploiting the collaboration between designers and tools. The optimization tools perform the design space exploration, while the human designers use their expertise to guide the exploration by restricting the design space. Experimental results based on a robot car configuration problem and an unmanned aerial vehicle design problem show that the methodology can efficiently and effectively discover unconventional designs while optimizing the design objectives.