Over the last two decades, much effort has been devoted to promoting the integration
and interaction between the cyber and physical parts of our world. This motivates
the concept of Cyber-Physical System (CPS), which has already attracted attention
from the government, academia and industry. Regarding the interaction of the cyber
world with the physical world, a hot topic emerging is the Internet-of-Things (IoT),
which describes the vision that everything is interconnected. CPS is similar to
IoT but presents a higher combination and coordination between the physical and
informational world. CPS has been applied in a variety of domains such as: industry,
agriculture, transportation, and electricity system (e.g., smart grid), imposing huge
potential in promoting the life quality of human beings.
CPS is a cross-discipline topic covering a wide range of fields from hardware
to software, like integrated circuit, embedded system, control, computation, communication,
system integration, and so on. The development on each field shall
advance the development of CPS. It is significant to investigate how to advance the
development of CPS, especially with joint consideration of other newly emerging
computing and communication technology or concept like cloud computing, big
data, fog computing, crowdsourcing, and so on, from various aspects such as
architecture, application, security, and privacy.
To this end, we invited pioneering researchers and engineers to discuss some
key issues from these aspects and to present some insightful opinions, concepts,
innovations and achievements in CPS. Various new CPS technologies from diverse
aspects enable a higher level of innovation towards intelligent life are discussed
in this book. It provides deep insight to the future integration, coordination and
interaction between the physical world, the information world and our human
beings. These works shall inspire more future studies to further advance the
development and exploitation of CPS.