Cyber-physical systems: basics and fundamentals

In the first decade of the 21st century, the cyber world and the physical world were considered as two different entities. However, in the literature we can easily find that these two entities are closely correlated with each other after integration of sensor and actuators in the cyber systems. Cyber systems became responsive to the physical world by enabling real-time control emanating from conventional embedded systems, thus giving birth to a new research paradigm named the cyber-physical system (CPS). In this chapter, we investigate the major challenges in integrating the cyber world with the physical world and its applications, followed by the basics and fundamentals of CPS. In addition, we discuss the CPS requirements for building its architectures, which should contain several modules supporting the CPS. The motivation of this chapter is to provide an overview of the CPS and the prerequisite knowledge for modeling and simulations.