Editorial to the theme section on model-based design of cyber-physical systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are engineered systemswhere functionalities are emerging from the networked interaction of physical and computational processes. CPS are a pervasive technology advancement, which is impacting today all industrial sectors and almost all aspects of society. While CPS design as a new research area started over a decade ago, the recent emergence of new industrial platforms for creating CPS such as the Internet of things (IoT), industrial Internet (II) and fog computing in theUSAand Industrie 4.0 inEurope greatly accelerated the productization and deployment of the technology and created a “gold rush” toward new markets. Since model-based design plays pivotal role in all areas of engineered systems, it is an important issue to examine what are the new challenges for model-based design in CPS? Model-based design uses formal and sufficiently complete models of physical and computational processes, their environment and their interactions. These models are expected to be mathematically and physically accurate for verifying and testing the behavior of the designed system against established requirements. The main promise of model-based design is a significant decrease or elimination of costly design-build-test-redesign iterations and a higher degree of verified safety, performance and reliability. The ultimate goal is “correct-by-construction”, where properties of the synthesized models of the designed system predict the properties of the implemented/manufactured system with sufficient accuracy. The core CPS challenge for model-based design is that abstraction layer(s) used in the design flow span both cyber and physical aspects. These abstraction layers and the related modeling concepts are selected according to the essential