The penetration of Information, Communication and Intelligent Control into the shop floor is transforming it into a system featuring a tight combination of, and coordination between, the system’s computational and physical elements, i.e., a Cyber-Physical System (CPS). That is, the shop floor appears as a complex set of multi-disciplinary, connected, heterogeneous systems that function as a complex system whose overall properties are greater than the sum of its parts. New product lines and systems that are CPS-based transform all industrial sectors. Multi-disciplinary in nature, the shop floor as such a system of CPS links many component systems of a wide variety of scales. The resulting combined and structurally evolvable systems are able to address problems which the individual components alone would be unable to do and to yield control and automation functionality that is only present as a result of the creation of new, “emergent”, information sources, and results of cooperation, composition of individual capabilities, aggregation of existing and emergent features.

Current research in the area of CPS can be generally listed as follows.

• Abstractions and heterogeneous models for the cyber-physical systems
• Architectures for cyber-physical systems
• Cloud based cyber-physical systems
• High-confidence and safety-critical networked control systems
• Modular and component-based design of cyber-physical systems
• Embedded computing and communication in cyber-physical systems
• Optimization and resource allocation in cyber-physical systems
• Real-time scheduling and performance of cyber-physical systems
• Distributed implementation and fault detection in cyber-physical systems
• Verification and run-time monitoring of cyber-physical systems
• Cyber security and trust in control of cyber-physical systems