Department: PhD in Computer Science
Module Description: Many societal challenges of the 21st Century, such as energy-water-food nexus, global climate change, health, sustainable transport, integrated economy, and coping with the challenge of an ageing population are all highly interconnected and global in nature. The emergence of The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) which is characterised by global cyber-physical-systems that are blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological worlds will fundamentally transform humankind. The United Nations predicts that, by 2050 nearly 70% of the world's population will be concentrated in urban centres thereby transforming major global cities into intelligent Smart Cities. It is predicted that by 2020, connected smart Internet-of-Things devices will reach over 50 billion, outnumbering connected people by a ratio of six to one. Internet of Things will be a key component that would revolutionise how Smart Cities and their resources are managed and will be the basis for The Fourth Industrial Revolution. These global technological-enabled platforms draw together cyber-physical-systems of systems, Internet of Things and Internet of Services and generate strong interdependencies between different social, technological, and natural systems. The scale of challenges laid down by the multidimensionality of these global problems including the interconnectedness of decisions across different policy sectors and the emergence of technological-enabled global platforms such as Smart Cities and The Fourth Industrial Revolution/Industry 4.0 will require systems that work at completely different scales and at completely different constraints than today’s systems. This will require new ways of thinking and new Systems Engineering approaches. Hence, the emergence of Systems of Systems (SoS) and Systems of Systems Engineering (SoSE) presents a potential for solving many of these challenges. This research-based course aims to develop students’ understanding of the challenges posed by the emergence of SoSE and needed research into concepts and approaches that will be required for the engineering of ultra-large-scale complex, systems of systems such as Smart Cities, The Fourth Industrial Revolution/Industry 4.0, Energy Smart Grids, Global Financial Systems, Global Health Systems, Food Supply Chain, etc.
Alur, R. (2015). Principles of cyber-physical systems. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Gilchrist, A. (2016). Industry 4.0 : the industrial internet of things. New York: Apress.
Greengard, S. (2015). The internet of things. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Sommerville, I. (2016). Software engineering. 10th edn. Global edn. Harlow: Pearson.
