Cyber-Physical Systems in Smart City: Challenges and Future Trends for Strategic Research

Abstract

Modern cities today compete with each other to be smarter, maintain a more sustainable with high-quality living, acquire talents, and provide jobs. This digital transformation through agile drivers will help address the increasing challenges of urbanization in a couple of decades. The Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is becoming pervasive in every aspect of smart city daily life and considered as one of the four fundamental conceptual approaches of the fourth generation industrial revolution (Industry 4.0). CPS used to describe the next generation of a diverse spectrum of complicated, multidisciplinary, physically comprehending engineered systems that integrates embedded cyber aspects into the physical world. It implants computation technologies, communication control, the convergence of information, and physical processes together with strategic importance internationally. CPS is still a vast research area. As a result, it opens venues for applications across multiple scales. This paper presents an in-depth survey of the related works, focusing on the design and how it relates to different research fields, current concepts, and real-life applications to understand CPS more precisely. Further, it enumerates an extensive set of CPS challenges and opportunities, introducing visionary ideas, research strategies, and future trends expected for future-oriented technological solutions, like cloud computing, Internet of Things, and Big Data. These technological solutions are to play a critical role in CPS research and have significant impacts on the smart city.