Cyber-Physical Systems

Norbert Wiener released "Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine" in 1948. 65 years later, people are still debating the issue and constantly come up with fancy new terms for the subject (i.e. titles for grant proposals).

What I take away from this group is that deterministic communication is required for deterministic system behavior. Well, everybody knew that.

The only thing that surprised me in the field since a long time is that reasoning about continuous and discrete systems is essentially the same [1].

[1] http://symbolaris.net/pub/freedL.pdf

I've seen this terminology before:

Bayne, Jay S. Cyberspatial Mechanics, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics-part b: Cybernetics, Vol. 38, No. 3, June 2008. IEEE.

There's the beginning of an implementation that's part of what I called the Viable System Agent, written in Smalltalk:

http://ss3.gemstone.com/ss/VSA.html

Look at the RBC-VSA-CPS category if you are interested.