Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems [Scanning the Issue]

In recent years, we have been witnessing rapid changes in the industrial environment, mainly driven by business and societal needs toward mass and extreme customization. This is supported by new disruptive advances in the cross fertilization of concepts and the amalgamation of information-, communication-, and controltechnology-driven approaches in traditional industrial automation and control systems. In this industrial context, industrial cyber–physical systems (ICPSs) combine the progress achieved by the application of large distributed computing systems on product and production system planning, engineering, and operation with the power of digital data that are produced during manufacturing processes and also the data collected by the Internet of Things such as sensors and actuators embedded into the products. All these are strong signs that a new generation of “networked smart systems” is embedded into the industrial environment. The technological, economic, and social impacts of these developments are so enormous that the whole process is labeled as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Advances in these interconnected capabilities affect virtually every engineered industrial system. Future ICPS applications are expected to be more transformative than the IT revolution of the past three decades. There are many challenges ahead that need to be addressed in the convergence of computing, control, and communications for ICPSs. There is a need for the investigation of a wide spectrum of foundations and research fields relevant to ICPSs to address the unique scientific and technical challenges of ICPSs. This Special Issue presents some of the latest developments and achievements on several fronts, i.e., the architecture, the design, the enabling technologies, and a representative set of applications of cyber–physical systems introduced and used in the industrial environments. It is an attempt to provide an international forum for a diverse group of researchers, industrialists, and practitioners from different areas that This Special Issue presents the latest developments and achievements in industrial cyber–physical systems (ICPSs). The papers in this issue cover key areas on architecture, design, enabling technologies, and applications of ICPSs. Additionally, they present emerging trends and visions of ICPSs for future investigations.