  Wireless sensor-actuator networks (WSANs) are gaining momentum in industrial
process automation as a communication infrastructure for lowering deployment
and maintenance costs. In traditional wireless control systems the plant
controller and the network manager operate in isolation, which ignore the
significant influence of network reliability on plant control performance. To
enhance the dependability of industrial wireless control, we propose a holistic
cyber-physical management framework that employs run-time coordination between
the plant control and network management. Our design includes a holistic
controller that generates actuation signals to physical plants and reconfigures
the WSAN to maintain desired control performance while saving wireless
resources. As a concrete example of holistic control, we design a holistic
manager that dynamically reconfigures the number of transmissions in the WSAN
based on online observations of physical and cyber variables. We have
implemented the holistic management framework in the Wireless Cyber-Physical
Simulator (WCPS). A systematic case study has been presented based on two
5-state plants sharing a 16-node WSAN. Simulation results show that the
holistic management design has significantly enhanced the resilience of the
system against both wireless interferences and physical disturbances, while
effectively reducing the number of wireless transmissions.
