The engineering of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) requires assessing different design and architecture alternatives during the development and maybe run-time of the system. The design space including different alternatives of such systems is very large and typically cannot be explored or assessed manually. Facing the multitude of design decisions to be taken into account, automating and guiding the finding of design alternatives will reduce drastically design time and cost. Such automation however faces at least two main challenges. First, design decisions are typically made based on extensive expert knowledge that cannot be simply mapped to algorithms. Secondly, the involved design spaces are often very large, and developing efficient procedures is of crucial importance. The IDEAL workshop intends to bring together experts from industry and academia to discuss the needs, today’s possibilities and future research directions for industrial applicable support for the exploration of design alternatives of CPS.