Collaborative Research: CyberTraining: Pilot: Concurrent Computing Curricula for Cyber-Physical Systems

Automobiles, aircraft, and other safety-critical systems depend on software that must perform many tasks simultaneously. Small timing or coordination mistakes can go unnoticed and later lead to unsafe behavior and costly failures. This project develops practical training materials to help engineers build safer, more reliable safety-critical systems. Improved training gives engineers the practical knowledge and hands-on experience needed to build safer, more reliable systems. By strengthening this dimension of engineering education, the nation's infrastructure will be safer and more reliable. This project develops a modular curriculum and open educational tools for concurrent and distributed computing in engineering contexts. Technical activities include four learning modules that address: (1) the foundations of concurrent execution, including race conditions, deadlock, synchronization primitives, and the happens-before relation; (2) fault tolerance in distributed systems, covering failure taxonomies, checkpointing, consensus protocols, and self-stabilization; (3) timing and synchronization in autonomous vehicle software, using the Robot Operating System 2 and the CARLA simulation environment to expose how scheduling and message-passing choices affect safety-critical control pipelines; and (4) safety and security assurance in aviation systems, using agent-based simulation to model unmanned aerial system swarms, aeronautical communication networks, and collision-avoidance invariants. On the tooling side, the project extends and modernizes an existing concurrency visualization system by adding instrumentation libraries for three widely used platforms in cyber-physical systems: POSIX threads, FreeRTOS, and Robot Operating System 2. The project also develops a concurrent event description language for instructor-created demonstrations and evaluates outcomes through classroom pilots, pre- and post-assessments, and usability studies. Expected contributions include reusable instructional modules and software tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2612129 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Steven Carr | Institution: Western Michigan University, KALAMAZOO, MI | Award Amount: $120,941 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2612129 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2612129.html