Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Cyber-Physical Systems and Services

The papers in this special section focus on cyber-physical systems and applications for their use. A cyber-physical system (CPS) integrates a vast variety of static and mobile resources, including sensor and actuator networks, swarms of robots, remote-controlled vehicles, critical infrastructures, control and decision software, static data and just-in-time information from sensors, knowledge, data analytics and fusion software, event driven supply chains, and humans, and offers great potential for achieving tasks that are far beyond the capabilities of existing systems [1]. Individual users, organizations, and various communities can transform the vast space of cyberphysical entities into capabilities that no single entity can achieve alone. However, these capabilities do not come easily. Intelligence is needed for just-in-time composition of resources into services. Associated challenges include how to manage the vast number and diverse varieties of static and mobile physical entities, how to describe the capabilities of the cyber-physical entities, how to decompose high level goals into low-level control commands for the individual entities, how to achieve intelligent coordination and manage information flow among the entities.