Cyber-Physical Systems

Making the interconnected world work in a flexible and efficient, but safe and reliable manner to the benefit of society

Cyber-physical Systems that combine the physical world with the virtual world are starting to play an ever more important role in our daily lives. In this research group, we’re looking at the fundamental concepts and challenges to realize the vision of an interconnected world. In particular, we focus on industrial communication systems.

In contrast to human-to-human communication, communication between machines requires a fundamentally new approach. While humans are inherently able to cope with imperfections in communication, machines require predictability. This covers aspects of correctness, latency, and context sensitivity, but also new sensing paradigms.

In our group, we especially focus on (safety-)critical industrial applications (Industry 4.0), but also on enabling new simulation methodologies for complex networked systems. Solving the fundamental challenges in these areas therefore enables the Internet of Everything.

Hot Topics

  1. In-network processing techniques for industrial control

    • Co-design approaches
    • Predictable system behavior
    • Theoretical and practical limits
  2. Low-latency ultra-reliable wireless systems

    • Network design
    • Reliability-enhancing strategies
    • Theoretical and practical limits
  3. Systems engineering and tool development

    • Replacement of Expected Values (mean) with hard guarantees
    • Guided design

Methodology and Tools

To convince stakeholders, new approaches need a solid theoretical base and validation through practical prototypes. Our design circle includes:

  1. Requirements analysis
  2. Analytical studies using abstract models
  3. Simulations and/or verification
  4. Real-world experiments
  5. Iteration and improvement

Available Theses

The Cyber-Physical Systems Group always has a range of thesis topics available for motivated and talented students. An excerpt of available theses can be seen from inside the RWTH University network.

Current Projects

Selected Past Projects

Selected Publications

Scalable Supply and Demand Matching Involving Up-to-Date Information from Individual Prosumers. Proceedings of the 16th ACM International Conference on Future and Sustainable Energy Systems (ACM e-Energy). June 2025.
Slicing Match-Action Pipeline Resources for Multitenancy on Programmable Switches. 11th IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization. June 2025.
Advanced Filtering of Unknown Devices in Event-Based NILM. ACM SIGEnergy Energy Informatics Review (SIGENERGY-EIR), vol. 4, no. 5. April 2025.
A Critical Review of Household Water Datasets. Proceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (BuildSys 2024), Hangzhou City, China. November 2024.
Delay-aware Model Predictive Control for Fast Frequency Control. Proceedings of the 14th IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGridComm 2023), Oct 31 - Nov 3, 2023, Glasgow, United Kingdom. October 2023.
Harnessing Cooperative Anycast Communication for Increased Resilience in Wireless Control. Proceedings of the 61st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2022), Dec 6 - Dec 9, 2022, Cancun, Mexico. December 2022.
Determination of Throughput Guarantees for Processor-based SmartNICs. The 17th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT ‘21), Virtual Event Germany. December 2021.
Improving MAC Protocols for Wireless Industrial Networks via Packet Prioritization and Cooperation. International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks: Workshop on Communication, Computing, and Networking in Cyber Physical Systems (WoWMoM-CCNCPS'2020), Aug 31 - Sep 3, 2020, Cork, Ireland. August 2020.
Towards Executing Computer Vision Functionality on Programmable Network Devices. 1st ACM CoNEXT Workshop on Emerging in-Network Computing Paradigms (ENCP ‘19), Orlando, FL, United States. December 2019.
Towards an Infrastructure Enabling the Internet of Production. Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS ‘19), May 6 - May 9, 2019, Taipei, Taiwan. May 2019.