Smart Cyber Physical Systems from the Software Engineering Perspective (sCPS-SE)

Dear Colleagues,

This is an invitation to contribute to this Special Issue and make your mark in this growing and extremely important field of software engineering for smart Cyber Physical Systems (sCPS).

Smart means “having or showing a quick-witted intelligence.” In a system or software, the key becomes defining what intelligence is. In general, a smart system is one that is capable of making the right decisions at the right time and adapting to the results. In CPS, we have many of the required components to achieve smartness: Sensors provide the necessary observations and data; software components to understand the data; and actuators to apply the necessary actions. All of this is designed in a closed feedback loop for continuous operations. Making CPS smart requires introducing more sophisticated capabilities to the software components to enable advanced analytics and intelligent functions that can respond effectively and efficiently to different situations. This introduces the need for more storage and processing power in such systems. Therefore, the limited capabilities of the CPS components become a prohibiting factor. As a result, we need to integrate more powerful resources such as the cloud to enable large scale storage and high performance processing. Collected data can be transferred to the cloud, which stores and analyze them to make intelligent decisions that are then passed back to the CPS components for action. Moreover, we can utilize fog and edge nodes to support sCPS systems by providing more localized features for systems that require real-time functionality, mobility and localization support.

The high volume of data, real-time requirements, multiple levels of integration and interoperations all lead to great challenges when designing and developing sCPS applications for any domain. As a result, it becomes critical to address these issues in a more formalized manner through the proper application of software engineering principles. In this Special Issue, we would like to highlight the importance of software engineering processes and tools to facilitate sCPS applications development. Work related to software development lifecycle and processes, requirements engineering, verification and validation, deployment and operations, to name some examples is welcome. Application of these principles within specific application domains like manufacturing, healthcare, transportation and many more are also encouraged. The following is a sample list of relevant areas; however, other relevant areas in this context are welcome:

• Software development processes for sCPS applications
• sCPS Software development life cycle models, issues and management
• Multi-paradigm modeling in sCPS
• Inter-disciplinary approaches for building sCPS applications
• Architectural design approaches for sCPS
• Software-based reliability and availability of sCPS
• Integration challenges for sCPS systems and components
• Interoperation issues across platforms and components for sCPS
• sCPS software requirements engineering
• Verification and validation procedures and tools for sCPS applications
• Deployment and operational challenges of sCPS systems
• Managing uncertainties and emergent behaviors in sCPS environments
• Standardization efforts for sCPS software components
• Integration of cloud and fog computing with sCPS systems
• Addressing specific sCPS software requirements like mobility, localization and real-time processing
• Incorporating intelligent software in sCPS applications
• Integrating big data analytics tools and algorithms for sCPS applications
• Addressing software security issues in sCPS systems
• Scalability of sCPS applications
• Software design and development of domain specific sCPS applications such as:
  • Smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0
  • Smart healthcare systems
  • Smart grids and utility systems
  • Smart energy management systems
  • Smart transportation systems
  • Smart city applications
  • Smart home systems

Papers in the above or relevant topics in software engineering for sCPS are welcome. Both original research contributions and review papers will be considered for publication. Please make sure you follow the MDPI Computer submission instructions when you prepare your papers.

Dr. Jameela Al-Jaroodi
Dr. Nader Mohamed
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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