Introduction to the special section on Software Architecture and Modeling for Industrial Internet of Things

Abstract

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) refers to the tight integration of computation, networking, and physical objects for Industry, in which embedded devices are networked to sense, monitor and control the physical world to promote progress of business and manufacture. It will bring unprecedented opportunities to business and combine the global reach of the Internet with a new ability to directly control the physical world, including the machines, factories, infrastructures and environment that define the modern cyber-physical systems (CPS). Making sense of IIoT, particularly in the software architecture and modeling, can be challenging. The software architecture and modeling for IIoT are very important in applications. They affect the quality of services (QoS) of modern industry, enabled by cyber-physical systems, mobile computing and sensor networking technologies. The potential applications of IIoT include assisted novel mobile computing systems, smart Connection between the cyber space and the physical space, data acquisition from industrial equipments, modeling for social business networks and manufacturing, environmental monitoring and control, distributed critical infrastructure control, smart cities, green communication and applications, etc. Through a peer-review process, we have accepted nine papers from a total of twenty-one papers submitted to this special issue, an acceptance rate of 42.9%. Each selected paper received input during at least two rounds of peer-reviews. The accepted papers represent activities in the area round the world and propose various theoretical researches and applications on software architectures and modeling method for Industrial Internet of Things.