Situation based control for cyber-physical environments

The use of event-based paradigms to handle control problems in cyber-physical environments is of critical research importance. Most current works however provide partial solutions by only considering individual aspects like event detection, temporal calculi or signal based control. There is thus a need to define a new problem of situation based control which supports symbolic reasoning, strong temporal support and explicit inclusion of domain knowledge to undertake intelligent control in dynamic environments. We describe the problem from a traditional control theoretic perspective and show how it can be handled in practice using the semantics of ‘Situation Calculus’. The motivations for future research as well as the research challenges have been identified. The use of the proposed approach to support emerging cyber-physical applications is demonstrated through the example of a multimodal tele-presence application involving selection of appropriate sensor and actuator parameters based on exogenous user actions.