Guest Editorial: New Advancements in Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems

THE past decades have witnessed rapid transformations in the industrial environment, mainly driven by business and societal needs toward production customization and the digitalization of the economy, i.e., digitalization and interconnection of products, services, enterprises, and people. This trend is supported by new disruptive advances in the crossfertilization of concepts and the amalgamation of information-, communication-, control-, and mechatronics technology-driven approaches in traditional industrial systems. The prevalence of information communication technologies in industry context has drastically expanded the presence and power of cyberspace and changed the way of information collection and exploitation, enabling the transformation of the traditional industrial settings into an industrial environment on the basis of cyber-physical systems (CPSs). This utilization of CPS in industrial settings led to the development of industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPSs) [1]. In this industrial context, ICPSs combine the progress achieved by the application of large distributed computing systems on product and production system planning, engineering, and operation with the power of digital data that are produced during manufacturing processes and also the data collected by the Internet of Things such as sensors and actuators embedded into the products [1]. All these are strong signs that a new generation of “networked smart systems” is embedded into the industrial environment. The technological, economic, and social impacts of these developments are so enormous that the whole process is labeled as the Fourth Industrial Revolution [2]. Advances in these interconnected capabilities affect virtually every engineered industrial system. Future ICPS applications are expected to be more transformative than the IT revolution of the past three decades. The profound coordination between the physical and cyber domains of the ICPS makes the involved entities interact in significantly complicated ways, which presents many challenges ahead in the convergence of computing, control, mechatronics, and communications for ICPS ecosystems [3], [4]. There is a need for investigating and learning a wide spectrum of foundations, research, innovation, and technological fields relevant to CPSs to address the unique scientific and technical challenges of ICPSs. How to address the penetration and proliferation of such