Guest Editorial Introduction to the Special Section on Network Science for High-Confidence Cyber-Physical Systems

The papers in this special section focus on network science for high confidence cyber-physical systems (CPS) Here CPS refers to the engineered systems that can seamlessly integrate the physical world with the cyber world via advanced computation and communication capabilities. To enable high-confidence CPS for achieving better benefits as well as supporting emerging applications, network science-based theories and methodologies are needed to cope with the ever-growing complexity of smart CPS, to predict the system behaviors, and to model the deep inter-dependencies among CPS and the natural world. The major objective of this special section is to exploit various network science techniques such as modeling, analysis, mining, visualization, and optimization to advance the science of supporting high-confidence CPS for greater assurances of security, safety, scalability, efficiency, and reliability. These papers bring a timely and important research topic. The challenges and opportunities of applying network science approaches to high-confidence CPS are profound and far-reaching.