Abstract. Developing Cyber-Physical Systems requires methods and tools to support simulation and verification of hybrid (both continuous and discrete) models. The Acumen modeling and simulation language is an open source testbed for exploring the design space of what rigorousbut-practical next-generation tools can deliver to developers of CyberPhysical Systems. Like verification tools, a design goal for Acumen is to provide rigorous results. Like simulation tools, it aims to be intuitive, practical, and scalable. However, it is far from evident whether these two goals can be achieved simultaneously. This paper explains the primary design goals for Acumen, the core challenges that must be addressed in order to achieve these goals, the "agile research method" taken by the project, the steps taken to realize these goals, the key lessons learned, and the emerging language design.

Abstract-Rigorous simulation is a new technology that can play a key role in managing uncertainty in the design of safetycritical cyber-physical systems. One of its important applications is the analysis and evaluation of functional safety for road vehicles according to international standards such as ISO 26262. Previous work presented preliminary evidence to support the feasibility of using rigorous simulation for this purpose. Here we report on advances in our implementation of rigorous simulation and show how they enable the rigorous simulation of more refined and more complete models. A larger case study highlights the benefits of these advances and helps us identify new challenges that should be addressed by future work.

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Effective and creative Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) development requires expertise in disparate fields that have traditionally been taught in several distinct disciplines. At the same time, students seeking a CPS education generally come from diverse educational backgrounds. In this paper, we report on our recent experience of developing and teaching a course on CPS. The course addresses the following three questions: What are the core elements of CPS? How should these core concepts be integrated in the CPS design process? What types of modeling tools can assist in the design of Cyber-Physical Systems? Our experience with the first four offerings of the course has been positive overall. We also discuss the lessons we learned from some issues that were not handled well. All material including lecture notes and software used for the course are openly available online.

We continue to consider the question of what language features are needed to effectively model cyber-physical systems (CPS). In previous work, we proposed using a core language as a way to study this question, and showed how several basic aspects of CPS can be modeled clearly in a language with a small set of constructs. This paper reports on the result of our analysis of two, more complex, case studies from the domain of rigid body dynamics. The first one, a quadcopter, illustrates that previously proposed core language can support larger, more interesting systems than previously shown. The second one, a serial robot, provides a concrete example of why we should add language support for static partial derivatives, namely that it would significantly improve the way models of rigid body dynamics can be expressed.