Guest Editorial: Industrial Cyber–Physical Systems—New Trends in Computing and Communications

The papers in this special section focus on industrial cyber-physical systems (CPS), with an emphasis on computing and communications applications. CPS systems are defined by integrating computation and communication facilities on the one hand and the monitoring and control of physical processes on the other hand. Industrial cyber–physical systems (ICPS) refer to the science and art of designing and using cyber–physical systems for industrial and process control applications, for example in smart factories, smart energy grids, smart transportation systems, smart cities, and several other areas. Many of these applications are time- and mission-critical and hence often require low latency and high reliability. In parallel, there has been a strong growth in integrating intelligence, often in the form of machine/deep learning, into applications, which also leads to vastly increasing computational requirements. These innovations then will be integrated into complex systems, which need to be properly engineered to become safe, reliable, trustworthy, and secure while at the same time being cost-efficient.