Optimization and Control for Secure and Reliable Cyber-Physical Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) integrate sensing, communication, computation, and control to enable intelligent monitoring and decision-making in complex engineered systems. With the rapid development of advanced sensing technologies, wireless communication networks, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, CPSs are becoming increasingly interconnected, data-driven, and autonomous. These developments have significantly expanded the scope of CPS applications across industrial automation, smart manufacturing, intelligent transportation systems, smart grids, and large-scale infrastructure systems.

Despite these advances, ensuring the security, reliability, and resilience of CPSs remains a critical challenge. Modern CPSs operate in dynamic and uncertain environments and are vulnerable to faults, cyberattacks, communication constraints, and model uncertainties. As a result, traditional control and monitoring approaches are often insufficient for guaranteeing safe and reliable operation. Recent progress in optimization, learning-based control, distributed estimation, and anomaly detection offers new opportunities to enhance the robustness and efficiency of CPSs. However, significant challenges remain in developing scalable algorithms, integrating data-driven methods with physical system models, and designing security-aware control architectures.

This Special Issue aims to present recent advances in optimization and control methods for secure and reliable cyber-physical systems. We invite high-quality research contributions addressing theoretical developments, algorithmic innovations, and real-world applications in CPSs. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Secure and resilient control for cyber-physical systems;
• Fault diagnosis and anomaly detection in CPSs;
• Distributed optimization and control in networked systems;
• Learning-based control and data-driven methods for CPSs;
• Networked control systems with communication constraints;
• Security-aware estimation and monitoring methods;
• Industrial process monitoring and alarm management;
• Cyber-attack detection and mitigation in CPSs;
• Optimization methods for large-scale CPSs;
• Control and optimization for smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0.

Prof. Dr. Nachuan Yang
Dr. Ziyi Guo
Dr. Jason J. R. Liu
Guest Editors

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