Future Generation Computer Systems xxx (xxxx) xxx

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Future Generation Computer Systems

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/fgcs

Editorial

Editorial: Smart Cyber–Physical Systems: Toward Pervasive

Intelligence systems
Flavia C. Delicato a ,1 , Adnan Al-Anbuky b ,2 , Kevin I-Kai Wang c ,2
a
Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
b
Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
c
The University of Auckland, New Zealand

article info a b s t r a c t

Article history: Cyber–physical systems (CPSs) are the next generation of engineering systems, in which computing,
Available online xxxx communication and process control technologies are transparently integrated, constituting novel type
Keywords:
of autonomous system. In these systems, embedded computers and networks monitor (through
Cyber–Physical Systems sensors) and control (through actuators) the physical processes, usually with feedback loops where
Pervasive systems physical processes and computations affect each other. By equipping physical objects with interfaces
Computational intelligence to the virtual world, and by incorporating intelligent mechanisms to leverage collaboration between
Smart systems these objects, the boundaries between the physical and virtual realms become blurred. Interactions
Security occurring in the physical world can change the processing behavior in the virtual world, in a causal
relationship that can be exploited for the constant improvement of processes. Intelligent, self-aware,
self-managing and self-configuring pervasive systems can be built to improve quality of process in
many important application domains such as transportation, energy, industrial and medical systems.
The goal of this special issue is to report high-quality research on recent advances toward the
realization of the Smart Cyber–Physical Systems paradigm. By presenting a selection of papers on
various topics related to Smart Cyber–Physical Systems, we hope to shed light on the multiple aspects
of this emerging paradigm. The papers included in this issue propose solutions for data processing and
analysis, architecture, platforms and technology enablers, energy and security management, as well as
its application to building smart and sustainable spaces.
© 2019 Published by Elsevier B.V.

1. Introduction virtual components), and applying intelligence techniques, are

Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS) [1–4] refer to the seamless in-
tegration of computation with physical processes, possibly with
humans in the loop. In these systems, embedded computers and
networks monitor (through sensors) and control (through actua-
tors) the physical processes, usually with feedback loops where
physical processes and computations affect each other. A key
point in these systems is the control of physical processes from
the monitoring of variables and the use of computational intelli-
gence to obtain a deep knowledge of the monitored environment,
thus providing timely and more accurate decisions and actions.
The growing interconnection of physical and virtual worlds, and
the development of increasingly sophisticated intelligence tech-
niques, has opened the door to the next generation of CPS, that
is referred to as smart cyber–physical systems (sCPS). sCPS are
large-scale software intensive and pervasive systems, which by
combining various data sources (both from physical objects and
1 Lead Guest Editor.
2 Guest Editor.
able to efficiently manage real-world processes and support a
broad range of novel applications and services.
By equipping physical objects with interfaces to the virtual
world, and by incorporating intelligent mechanisms to leverage
collaboration between these objects, the boundaries between the
physical and virtual realms become blurred. Interactions occur-
ring in the physical world can change the processing behavior in
the virtual world, in a causal relationship that can be exploited for
the constant improvement of processes. Intelligent, self-aware,
self-managing and self-configuring pervasive systems can be built
to improve quality of process across a variety of application
domains, helping to address several contemporary social and
environmental issues.
Components of a sCPS must have a high degree of auton-
omy while cooperating with each other in a robust, scalable
and decentralized way. However, several challenges need to be
overcome in order to realize such a paradigm, which is highly
multidisciplinary. These challenges range from the design of in-
telligent and energy efficient physical infrastructures for sens-
ing and communication, data stream processing, data analytics

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2019.06.031
0167-739X/© 2019 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Please cite this article as: F.C. Delicato, A. Al-Anbuky and K.I.-K. Wang, Editorial: Smart Cyber–Physical Systems: Toward Pervasive Intelligence systems, Future Generation
Computer Systems (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2019.06.031.
2 F.C. Delicato, A. Al-Anbuky and K.I.-K. Wang / Future Generation Computer Systems xxx (xxxx) xxx
and machine learning techniques to build the intelligence core
of these systems through the development of self-adaptive and
context-aware software. Moreover safety, social and behavioral
issues also need to be considered, when including human beings
as an integral part of these highly complex systems.
This special issue aims to report high-quality research on re-
cent advances toward the realization of the Smart Cyber–Physical
Systems paradigm. Our goal is to shed light in the multifaceted
aspects of this emerging paradigm, including solutions for data
processing and analysis, architecture, platforms and technology
enablers, energy and security management, as well as its appli-
cation to building smart and sustainable spaces. After a careful
review process performed by reviewers selected by the Guest
Editors, 17 papers were accepted addressing subjects that were
classified in the following categories: (i) data processing and
analysis; (ii) energy management; (iii) architecture, platforms
and technology enablers for Smart CPS; (iv) security manage-
ment; and (v) Cyber-enabled Smart Applications. The detailed
contributions of each paper are summarized in the next section.
2. Content of this issue
2.1. Data processing and analysis in Smart CPS
Environmental sensors of all kinds, social media, and large-
scale computing infrastructures have produced a variety of cyber–
physical–social data, ranging from values of the current temper-
ature in a room, Twitter posts, geographical location of people,
up to the trajectories of cars on highways. Analyzing these data
for extracting knowledge and producing useful information for
humans and computer systems is the key to obtaining the real
benefits of Smart CPS [5–7]. After being analyzed, the acquired
cyber–physical–social data is capable of providing inputs for in-
telligent process control and aiding decision making. Data analy-
sis in CPS encompasses from simple tasks such as data cleansing
and filtering, to complex data fusion processing and event de-
tection. The inherent volume, heterogeneity and distribution of
cyber–physical–social data pose challenges for the techniques to
be adopted in order to perform efficient and timely analyses.
Event detection has been a significant topic in the context
of data analyses techniques for a long time, since the initial
development of pervasive systems. Recently, with the explosion
of social networks, event-detection technologies have played an
increasingly important role for various purposes, such as recom-
mending future events, and instant sharing of events of interest.
Users of social media act as human sensors, providing data and
information in real time about entities and events. In the pa-
per [8], the authors claim that most of the research on event
detection – using human or non-human sensors – focuses only on
identifying events. These models assume an event to be a single
entity and ignore that it can be composed of other new events
over time. The detection of subevents enriches the understanding
of the main event, contextualizing it and creating a powerful
knowledge about the scenario. To capture the parts of an event
and the information changing over time, they proposed a scalable
and modeling based algorithm. The proposed algorithm identifies
subevents and creates labels to properly represent them. The
proposed sub-event detection approach was evaluated using two
large-scale Twitter corpuses. The first one is related to Brazil’s
political protests scenario. The second analyzes the Zika epidemic
in the world. Their approach detected several subevents, most
of them related to real subevents. Due to the nature of social
networks, with a minimum delay between an event occurrence
and its dissemination, these results can open an opportunity for
temporal tracking of emergence and outbreak scenarios.
In addition to the issue of detecting subevents cyber–physical–
social data, explored in the previous paper, another relevant
Please cite this article as: F.C. Delicato, A. Al-Anbuky and K.I.-K. Wang, Editorial: Smart Cyber–Physical Systems: Toward Pervasive Intelligence systems, Future Generation
Computer Systems (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2019.06.031.
issue to consider in event detection processes is the presence of
outliers. Outliers can be defined as readings that are outside what
is considered as a ‘‘normal state’’ of the data being collected (rep-
resented by a model, for example). These ‘‘abnormal’’ readings
are considered ‘‘events with extremely small probability of occur-
rence’’. That is, outliers are elements that differ significantly from
others in a dataset, which does not necessarily mean that they
represent errors. Sometimes, outliers can represent important
information about the CPS application in question. For example,
a health risk situation in a patient being monitored, or some
environmental risk [9]. Therefore, the detection of outliers in CPS
is very important for the correct analysis of the data and for
producing reliable information. In [10], the authors propose a
method to explore the multiway nature of urban spaces data in
outlier’s detection. The proposed method includes three stages:
(i) dimensionality reduction, where data is modeled as a 3rd-
order tensor; from this reduction, they extract a set of latent
factors to obtain the best fit for the next classification step;
(ii) classification of latent factors, where the latent factors from
the stage (i) are used to generate instances of similar events
in monitoring smart urban spaces which result in high-quality
clusters from the factorization; and (iii) combining steps (i) and
(ii) to generate a refined urban space pattern identification model.
The authors analyzed a real large-scale dataset with valuable data
captured and streamed by urban sensors from 4 cities: Elda and
Rois (Spain), Nuremberg (Germany), and Tallinn (Estonia). The
obtained results provided important insights as the observation
that there is a kind of cyclic time patterns of urban sensing, which
can be exploited for different purposes in an sCPS.
Another interesting avenue of research explored in this special
issue is data fusion techniques, particularly in the context of
wireless sensor networks (WSN) [11], one of the possible compo-
nents of a Smart CPS. Wireless sensor networks have evolved in
recent years, moving from single-application, monolithically and
inflexibly designed systems toward highly virtualized systems
aimed at supporting multiple heterogeneous applications [12].
With this new design approach, such networks can be viewed as
an integrated CPS infrastructure for a multitude of applications
which can be owned and developed by different users. As the
number of applications in a WSN increases, a growing amount
of sensor-generated data will be produced, from which useful
information can be extracted. In spite of the advances in energy
harvesting and in designing increasingly efficient and powerful
devices, wireless sensors and actuators still commonly rely on
batteries as their energy sources, whose replacement is undesir-
able or infeasible. Therefore, a major requirement in WSN is to
save energy in order to extend their operational lifetime. Among
the methods employed to extend network lifetime, Multisensor
data fusion (MDF) is one of the most widely used. According
to the authors in [13], traditional MDFs are not able to identify
different contexts, since they are designed using an application-
specific approach for the network. As the number of applications
increases, the application data ranges overlap and it becomes
more complex to identify the origin of each data sample to deliver
data to the correct application, with the consequence of reducing
data accuracy. In order to overcome these limitations, the authors
propose a MDF technique that divides the monitored interval into
a set of intervals (non-overlapped intervals and overlapped inter-
vals) and attributes each interval to an abstract sensor. Then they
use MDFs to identify (hidden) correlations in abstract sensors and
to exploit such knowledge to monitor the behavior of sensors
during their working life. Their proposal was validated through
simulations and tests on real nodes.
 F.C. Delicato, A. Al-Anbuky and K.I.-K. Wang / Future Generation Computer Systems xxx (xxxx) xxx
2.2. Energy management in Smart CPS
The importance of saving energy has already been mentioned
and explored in the previous discussed paper [13], since Cyber–
Physical Systems are usually composed of a myriad of battery-
powered devices. For better results, holistic solutions are needed
that increase the energy efficiency from the hardware devices
to the software that executes on them, through the use of data
aggregation and data fusion techniques such as the one men-
tioned above. Therefore, developers should pay attention to the
energy consumption of the global system so as not to compromise
the system lifetime. In [14] the authors contribute to increase
the energy-awareness of cyber–physical systems developers, in
order to help making informed decisions that promote the system
energy efficiency. According to the authors, there are plenty of
experimental studies that give hints about how to reduce the
energy consumption. However, this knowledge is not readily
available for the software developers of cyber–physical systems.
They normally use software development environments that do
not provide useful advice about the energy consumption of the
software solutions being implemented. In the paper, they pro-
pose a Developer Eco-Assistant to integrate the experimental
results obtained by researchers into the software development
environments. In the proposed solution, the energy information is
obtained in real-time from a repository of energy consuming con-
cerns, where researchers store their experimental measurements.
Developers use the repository to perform sustainability analyses,
which, in turn, will lead to greener design/implementation de-
cisions. In the paper, they illustrate the use of the approach in
the context of cyber–physical systems development using both
open source environments (e.g. JetBrains IDEs) and proprietary
environments (e.g. Waspmote development environment). They
experimentally demonstrated that cyber–physical systems can
reduce more than 40% of its energy consumption depending on
the scenario, reaching approximately 90% in some certain cases.
When adopting strategies for saving energy in CPS, one should
not lose sight of the overall quality of data and of the service
provided to applications and end users. A highly energy efficient
system that does not deliver correct data, makes accurate and
timely decisions does not meet the objectives for which it was de-
signed. An over-usage of periodic sensors (i.e. too frequent mea-
surements) may easily lead to quick battery depletion, besides
producing network congestion, and conversely, a lower usage
is likely to cause poor measurement quality. Therefore, the ele-
ments of a CPS, including the smart sensors, need to be carefully
configured in order to properly manage the energy-quality trade-
off. In [15], the authors propose a middleware that continuously
generates and exposes to the sensor network an energy-efficient
sensors configuration based on data live observations. Using a
live learning process, their contributions dynamically act on two
configuration points: (i) sensors sampling frequency, which are
optimized based on machine-learning predictability from pre-
vious measurements, (ii) network usage optimization according
to frequency of requests from deployed software applications.
As a major outcome of their work, a self-adaptive platform was
designed with an extended sensors battery life, while ensuring
a proper level of data quality and freshness. Through theoretical
and experimental assessments, they shown the capacity of the
proposed approach to constantly find a near-optimal tradeoff
between sensors and network usage, and measurement quality.
2.3. Architecture, platforms and technology enablers for Smart CPS
Innovative architectures, software platforms and technolo-
gies are needed to support the construction and execution of
highly complex and interconnected cyber–physical systems [16,
Please cite this article as: F.C. Delicato, A. Al-Anbuky and K.I.-K. Wang, Editorial: Smart Cyber–Physical Systems: Toward Pervasive Intelligence systems, Future Generation
Computer Systems (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2019.06.031.
3
17]. Challenges in this context include (iii) the development and
adaptation of technologies for the interconnection between phys-
ical and virtual elements that support their communication and
integration in a ubiquitous, seamless and reliable manner, (i) the
development and implementation of comprehensive frameworks
and architecture that include the physical and cybernetic ele-
ments of sCPS, and (ii) the adoption and adaptation of computing
platforms capable of effectively extracting useful information
from large amounts of raw data, in an effective and efficient way.
Regarding the interconnection of physical devices with the
cyber world, in recent years we have witnessed the continuous
evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) [18], which is one of the
pillars on which contemporary physical-cybernetic systems have
flourished. The IoT can be defined as an ensemble of different sys-
tems (e.g., Smart Roads, Smart Buildings, Smart Grids) composed
of heterogeneous but interacting components (e.g., humans, cars,
smartphones, gateways, smart meters) both individually and col-
lectively providing innovative cyber–physical services. Due to the
varying data volumes produced by smart devices, enterprises and
researchers seek methods that enable them to manage those
devices and process the real-time streams of data to generate
useful information in a timely manner [19]. Containers [20] have
been a recent and promising approach to help rapidly develop,
run, test and update IoT applications. The autoscaling capacity of
containers can adaptively allocate computing resources for vari-
ous data volumes over time. Therefore, elasticity, a critical feature
of a cloud platform, is significant to measure the performance of
lightweight containers. In the paper ‘‘Quantifying Cloud Elasticity
with Container-based Autoscaling’’, authored by Xuxin Tang, Fan
Zhang, Xiu Li, Samee Khan, Zhijiang Li, the authors propose a
framework with container auto-scaler. The proposed framework
monitors containers resource usage and accordingly scales in
or scales out containers in need. Further, they define elasticity
mathematically in order to quantify the cloud elasticity using
the proposed framework. Extensive experiments were carried out
with different workload modes, workload durations, and scaling
cool-down period of times. Results shown that the framework
captures the workload variation firmly with a very short delay.
They also found out that the container-enabled platform shows
the best elasticity in repeat workload mode due to its recurring
and predictable feature, and that the length of the cool-down
period should be properly set up in order to balance system
stability and good elasticity.
In [21], the authors claim that despite a decade of research, the
IoT is still into an emergent phase: instead of achieving the en-
visaged state of global interconnectivity of systems, devices and
people, it is currently shaped by few isolated IoT systems/devices
that provide conventional computing services mainly designed
for static environments with a-priori interactions. Nevertheless,
there is a clear and prominent trend toward a fully realized
IoT, in which arguably the key drivers will be cyber–physical,
highly dynamic and contextualized services, called by the authors
‘‘Opportunistic IoT Services’’. For such services, provisioning may
be meaningful only in certain space/time configurations and may
be subject to multiple heterogeneous constraints and conditions,
e.g., current user status, location, policies, etc. In this direction,
their work presents a full-fledged approach to the development
of Opportunistic IoT Services from high-level metamodeling up to
their concrete implementation and simulation.
In addition to the interconnection of heterogeneous devices
among themselves and with the Internet, largely enabled by
IoT, Smart Cyber–physical systems can be highly connected and
integrated in many other ways, often crossing the boundaries of
multiple application domains. Achieving the design of effectively
interconnected, cooperative, autonomous systems that maintain
the man in the loop is a major challenge for the widespread
4 F.C. Delicato, A. Al-Anbuky and K.I.-K. Wang / Future Generation Computer Systems xxx (xxxx) xxx
adoption of such systems in the future. One scenario where such
a challenge becomes more evident is in building CPSs for Smart
Cities [22]. Smart Cities combine advances in IoT, Big Data, Social
Networks, and Cloud Computing technologies with the demand
for cyber–physical applications in areas of public interest, such
as Health, Public Safety, and Mobility. The end goal is to leverage
the use of city resources to improve the quality of life of its
citizens. Achieving this goal, however, requires advanced support
for the development and operation of applications in a com-
plex and dynamic environment. Middleware platforms can pro-
vide an integrated infrastructure that enables solutions for smart
cities by combining heterogeneous city devices and providing
unified, high-level facilities for the development of applications
and services [23]. Although several smart city platforms have
been proposed in the literature, there are still open research
and development challenges related to their scalability, main-
tainability, interoperability, and reuse in the context of different
cities, to name a few. Moreover, available platforms lack scientific
validation, which hinders a comparative analysis of their applica-
bility. Aiming to close this gap, in [24], the authors propose the
InterSCity platform for Smart Cities. InterSCity is a microservices-
based and open-source platform that enables the collaborative
development of large-scale systems, applications, and services
for the cities of the future, contributing to turn them into truly
sCPS environments. In the paper, they present the architecture
of the InterSCity platform, followed by a comprehensive set of
experiments that evaluate its scalability properties. These exper-
iments were conducted using a smart city simulator to assess the
platform. The experimental results shown that the platform can
scale horizontally to handle the highly dynamic demands of a
large smart city while maintaining low response times as well
as the usefulness of the synthetic workload generation technique
used in the experiments.
As the volume and diversity of data collected through Smart
CPS increases, how to efficiently process and store data becomes
a challenging topic. In order to offer large enough data storage
with fast data access, a hybrid storage system that consists of
both traditional mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) and higher
performance solid state drive (SSD) is typically used. In hybrid
storage systems, different data is distributed on difference devices
according to their performance benefits, where performance-
critical data are ones that can lead to significant performance gain
if located on SSD. The key issue in hybrid storage systems is how
to identify performance-critical data properly. Existing identifi-
cation schemes mainly focus on two categories: hotness-based
identification (i.e. how frequent is the data accessed) [25,26] and
cost-based identification (e.g. latency cost of I/O access) [27,28].
In [29], a novel identification approach called FvRS was proposed
to properly identify high-cost hot data and to maximize the
utilization of SSD to improve system performance. The I/O cost
was more accurately modeled by evaluating both the request size
and data access sequentially. The FvRS system was implemented
on a Linux-based hybrid storage system and evaluated using
three real-workload traces and a famous benchmark Postmark.
The results showed that FvRS reduces I/O response time by up
to 45.6% and 25.1%, respectively, with existing hotness-based
identification and cost-based identification approaches.
In addition to storage, processing large amount of data col-
lected from sCPS and providing timely information and decision
are also critical to the success of real-world applications. MapRe-
duce paradigm is commonly used to handle batch and streaming
data and among all the existing frameworks, Spark, has gained
a wide adoption. However, Spark is vulnerable to the existence
of abnormal tasks (i.e. showing significant delay in comparison
with other tasks), which can lead to significant performance
degradation. To mitigate such performance issues, Spark uses a
Please cite this article as: F.C. Delicato, A. Al-Anbuky and K.I.-K. Wang, Editorial: Smart Cyber–Physical Systems: Toward Pervasive Intelligence systems, Future Generation
Computer Systems (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2019.06.031.
speculation mechanism to detect abnormal tasks during runtime.
However, such mechanism cannot detect all abnormal tasks and
does not provide the root causes of degraded performance. In [30]
an offline tool is proposed for Log-based Abnormal tasks Detec-
tion and Root-cause Analysis (LADRA) for big data processing with
Spark. LADRA can detect abnormal tasks by examining features
extracted from logs through statistical spatial–temporal analysis,
which consist of Spark execution logs and JVM garbage collec-
tion (GC) logs related to resource usage. Moreover, a General
Regression Neural Network (GRNN) is used to identify root causes
for abnormal tasks. The experimental results demonstrated that
LADRA outperformances the Spark speculation mechanism.
Coordination in such complex environments as Smart CPS
is undoubtedly one of the most challenging tasks and various
algorithmic and technologic solutions have been investigated in
this context. A very interesting possibility is investigated by the
author in [31]. He proposes extending the applicability of de-
centralized blockchain consensus protocols to the broad field of
sCPS. Blockchain technology consists in its core of the use of
consensus algorithms for coordination between parties involved
in a transaction. It was initially adopted in the context of digital
currencies and financial transactions but has recently attracted
huge attention from industry and academia and its use was
expanded for a myriad of applications. The author contribution
in the paper includes a proposal of a new family of cyber–
physical systems, an in-depth discussion of new possibilities and
inherent shortcomings. The proposed coupling of the data stor-
age mechanisms, communication and consensus protocols, allows
for deployment of self-sustaining cyber–physical environments
in which all the mission-critical aspects in both the cyber and
physical layer are effectively incentivized, coordinated and main-
tained. This includes the essential data storage, data exchange,
but also the production, transmission and distribution of energy.
The paper presents a comprehensive undertaking toward sym-
biotic cyber–physical systems and environments. The proposed
family of systems is decentralized and does not imply the ne-
cessity of reliance on trusted third parties. An architecture is
devised and discussed in the paper which incorporates physical,
blockchain-enabled sensors and actuators capable of monitoring
and altering parameters of the underlying physical layer. A par-
ticular instance of a blockchain-aided CPS’ is analyzed, in the
context of the power grid at both the micro and macro-grid
levels. At the macro-grid level, they explore the possibility of
utilizing blockchain-enabled physical actuators. These theoretical
actuators are able to introduce savings by a near real-time routing
of energy and enable for tracking of power losses thanks to de-
centralized accountability. At the micro-grid level, they propose
a network of blockchain enabled smart meters to coordinate
real-time auction-based energy trade. To glue together the el-
ements of such an open, trustless, decentralized system, they
discuss an intrinsic communication protocol capable of rewarding
intermediaries of a data exchange for each transmitted byte.
2.4. Security management in Smart CPS
As the number of smart and connected things grows in a sCPS,
responsibility on the transmitted data also needs to increase,
especially in terms of security aspects, as authentication, access
control, data protection, and trust, just to name a few. There is no
question that reliability, safety and security issues play a crucial
role in the acceptance and use of today’s and future sCPS. For a
sCPS to be reliable, secure, and safe, the system must be able to
adapt to the physical environment and withstand cybernetic and
physical attacks while maintaining data integrity and robustness.
In addition to primitives and architectures that manage typical
security aspects such as authorization, access control and data
 F.C. Delicato, A. Al-Anbuky and K.I.-K. Wang / Future Generation Computer Systems xxx (xxxx) xxx
integrity, trust between the parties (physical and virtual) of a sCPS
must be established and maintained.
In [32] the authors investigate security aspects in the context
of vehicular Cyber–Physical Systems. In such complex network
environments, there are trust-based recommendation schemes
that could effectively filter most of the false data. However, ac-
cording to the authors, these schemes may exhaust the resources
of the vehicular network, including energy, computation abil-
ity, and storage, causing a network outage. To ensure real-time
data transmission and security in a vehicular CPS network, they
propose a novel trust-based recommendation scheme (TBRS).
The paper has three main contributions. First, the isomerism of
vehicular sensor nodes in CPS networks, where differences of
mobility between normal nodes and selfish/malicious nodes is
analyzed. Second, a trust model is designed based on delivery
credibility and position intimacy of nodes; such a model can
adjust the weight coefficient of direct trust parameters, which can
be utilized to analyze the secure and trustable tasks in data trans-
mission. Third, to address attacks caused by selfish/malicious
nodes and sparsity issues of nodes in vehicular CPS, a secure
filtering algorithm based on K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) cooper-
ative computing is proposed. The trust value is computed by the
proposed trust model. The cooperative computing-based filtering
algorithm is utilized to filter false recommendation from self-
ish/malicious nodes, thus greatly reducing interference of these
nodes on the performance of vehicular CPS network. Experi-
mental results shown that the proposed scheme is superior to
the comparative schemes in terms of delivery rate, transmission
delay and reliability. Besides, the resistance against illegal eaves-
dropping attacks has increased by an average of 32.53% when
compared to other algorithms.
In [33] the authors present a solution for security in a different
domain of SCPS. The massive proliferation of sophisticated tech-
nologies into the heart of traditional Industrial Control Systems
has given birth to ‘‘smart Industrial Cyber–Physical Systems’’
(ICPS). While this industrial revolution has brought upon a wide
range of advantages, it also raised new design challenges and
exposed ICPS to a new breed of cyber–physical attacks. This pa-
per aims to integrate security primitives (e.g., enforcing/verifying
data authenticity) in control applications by formulating an inno-
vative architectural paradigm shift. More specifically, their pro-
posal is twofold. The authors elaborated a novel security-aware
control application architecture, which: (i) defines two security
primitives that are called at the beginning and at the end of
each program to verify and to enforce the required security
properties; and (ii) runs the key management code as a separate
program in order to isolate its implementation and to ensure its
minimal interference with the rest of the programs. They also
designed a lightweight key distribution protocol exploiting the
characteristics and computational advantages of symmetric key
cryptography and hash functions. Extensive experimental results
on a testbed replicating the precise hardware and software of a
node from a Romanian gas transportation network shown the
effectiveness of the proposed scheme and its applicability to
resource constrained ICPS.
2.5. Cyber-enabled smart applications
In addition to the domains of smart applications already ex-
plored in the previous papers, such as Industrial, Vehicular and
Smart Cities, another very relevant domain is that of Smart
Homes. In a society with a growing population of elders, provid-
ing efficient and cost-effective long-term care has become central
to reducing the economic and societal impact of this demographic
shift. Part of the solution to improving the well-being of the
elderly at home are smart homes. In [34] the authors examine
Please cite this article as: F.C. Delicato, A. Al-Anbuky and K.I.-K. Wang, Editorial: Smart Cyber–Physical Systems: Toward Pervasive Intelligence systems, Future Generation
Computer Systems (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2019.06.031.
5
the role of smart homes in monitoring the activities of the el-
derly, identifying safety hazards in the home, and understanding
environmental changes that may correlate with the deterioration
of cognitive and physical health. They present LaPlace, a system
used to manage context enriched behavior patterns learned in a
smart home with sensing devices. LaPlace is based on a formal
model to represent intelligible, context enriched behavior pat-
terns, an online adaptive learning algorithm called TIMe which
was created for learning such patterns. Context-awareness pro-
vides insights about behavior that may otherwise go unnoticed.
TIMe is a one-pass algorithm that uses a stream processing model.
The TIMe algorithm is presented in this paper along with an
extensive evaluation of it using real life datasets.
Fundamental to the Smart CPS is the understanding of and
interaction with human through various types of sensor inputs
and actuator outputs. Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is one
of the most critical elements in many sCPS such as smart homes,
elderly healthcare, and child monitoring. The advancement of
embedded and communication technologies has led to the pro-
liferation of a wide variety of sensors embedded in the ambient
environment and attached on humans as wearable devices. The
diversity and interleaved nature of heterogeneous sensor data
contributes to the major challenge of identifying and segmenting
sensor events and associating them with ongoing Activities of
Daily Living (ADL). Existing HAR proposals rarely explore se-
mantically based approach for distinguishing sensor events and
linking with the relevant human activities. The authors in [35]
proposed a new approach using Semiotic theory inspired on-
tological model to capture generic knowledge and inhabitant-
specific preferences for sensor event segmentation and HAR. The
proposed method was implemented and tested against 30 test
scenarios. The results demonstrated that all sensor events were
adequately segmented with 100% accuracy for single ADL scenar-
ios and minor improvement of 97.8% accuracy for composite ADL
scenarios.
In addition to identifying sensor events and human physical
activities, one of the main features of Smart CPS is to be able
to evolve and adapt toward user’s needs. In order to achieve
this goal, an accurate and efficient cognitive model that can
learn, memorize and recall past knowledge, in a way, mimicking
human brains, is required. However, the processing efficacy and
efficiency of such cognitive model pose critical challenge to small,
battery powered IoT devices. Therefore, using minimal resources
to facilitate learning and recall is of critical importance to the
success of IoT applications. In [36], the authors proposed a 3-
layer associative memory and recall (AMR) model, that makes use
of memory chunking mechanisms and knowledge–information–
data (KID) cognitive model to efficiently organize and form asso-
ciation of human activity knowledge. The proposed approach is
evaluated using the well know ‘‘Activities of Daily Living (ADLs)
dataset’’ and demonstrated better performance comparing with
the state-of-the-art approaches in finding associations between
human activities efficiently.
Another important application area of sCPS is the digitization
of medical applications, which is beneficial to the entire human
race in both developed and developing countries which are facing
scarcity of medical resources and personnel. A typical application
that is becoming increasingly common is the collection of gene
expression data and cyber-enabled tumor risk analysis. In this
application, a key challenge is to identify the distinct genes that
are the most likely to cause tumors. In [37], an improved SSO
(Simplified Swarm Optimization) algorithm is proposed with a
hybrid filter and local search strategy to achieve a higher clas-
sification accuracy with fewer selected genes. 10 tumor gene
expression datasets are used to evaluate the proposed algorithm
against nine well-known benchmark classification methods and
6 F.C. Delicato, A. Al-Anbuky and K.I.-K. Wang / Future Generation Computer Systems xxx (xxxx) xxx
other approaches from 6 referenced studies. The experimental
results showed that the proposed algorithm achieves better clas-
sification accuracy in comparison to the existing approaches. In
addition to tumor risk analysis, this improved algorithm also has
the potential to be used in pervasive patient monitoring and
health management to analyze physiological parameters, such as
ECG, blood pressure, and SPO2 .
3. Conclusions
In conclusion, the papers included in this Special Issue show
the diversity of research being conducted in the field of Smart
Cyber–Physical Systems. While this issue offers limited contribu-
tion to this field, we strongly believe it has opened the door for
more involved research on this important area of research.
Acknowledgments
The guest editors would like to thank all the authors and the
reviewers for their hard work in helping us organize this Special
Issue. They would also like to express their heartfelt gratitude
to the Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Peter Sloot, for giving us this great
opportunity, and the members of the Editorial Staff for their
support during the process.
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