Guidelines for a systematic review in systems and automatic engineering. Case study: distributed estimation techniques for cyber-physical systems

This paper presents some guidelines for conducting a systematic review SR (also referred to as a systematic literature review) in the field of systems and automatic engineering. Inspired by the available literature in SR in other fields, this paper presents an adaptation of this kind of review. In particular, we provide the advantages and limitations on the most used databases in this area and some advice on defining the boolean function for the search and the inclusion and exclusion criteria of the selected publications. The paper proposes some recommendations to extract and synthesize the data collected and, finally, some guides to create the final report. This methodology is applied to a practical case: distributed estimation techniques applied to cyber-physical systems (CPS).