UT ECE Professor Andreas Gerstlauer has been awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for research on "Network-Level Design of Cyber-Physical Systems." Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are computer systems that are deeply embedded into their environment to continuously sense, act and interact with the physical world. A large part of the CPS promise in application areas such as healthcare, transportation or energy comes from networking of such deeply embedded, physically distributed devices. However, this also comes with fundamentally new design challenges. Uncertainties inherent in wired or wireless communications make it difficult to provide correctness or performance guarantees. To tackle these challenges, Prof. Gerstlauer and his team of students aim to study novel formal design methods that will provide analysis and simulation approaches to evaluate and optimize performance, reliability and safety of networked CPS. This is expected to lead to new types of CPS design automation tools that will enable better, more advanced and more intelligent systems to be realized in the future.