Special issue on emerging trends in cyber-physical systems

Abstract

The pervasiveness of ever-faster computers and evercheaper communication bandwidth, and the integration of physical systems and processes with networked computing, is leading to the emergence of a new generation of engineered systems: cyber-physical systems (CPS). The potential of CPS systems in economics and society, ranging from miniscule (pace makers) to large-scale (the national power-grid), is vastly greater than first realized, and major investments are being made worldwide to develop the technology. Many of the CPS-related studies and efforts focused on the challenges the physical environment brings to the scientific foundations of networking and information technology. In particular, the physical components of such systems introduce safety and reliability requirements that are qualitatively different from those of general purpose computing. However, the full scope of this change has much more breadth and depth than a restructuring inside networking and information technology; it is a profound revolution that turns entire industrial sectors into producers of cyber-physical systems. The aim of this special issue (SI) is to present innovative researchers and technologies as well as developments related to CPS. This SI was organized using papers from the IEEE AINA 2010 International Conference, which was held in Perth, Western Australia from 20th to 23rd of April, 2010. AINA 2010 received 470 papers, of which only 120 were accepted for publication. We encouraged the authors of AINA 2010 to extend their papers and submit them to this SI. Based on their quality and relevance to the SI, we selected five papers. In the first paper by Vitabile et al., the authors address the issue of the increasing number of car accidents and present a low-intrusive, real-time drivers’ drowsiness detection system. The proposed system exploits the ‘‘bright pupil’’ phenomenon by means of an IR source light embedded in the car’s dashboard to quantify the drowsiness level in terms of percentage at which the driver’s eyes were closed more than 80%. The system is built using FPGA technology capable of processing 720 9 576 frames in 16.7 ms. The article presents the evaluation and testing of the system conducted in real-operating conditions. In the second paper, Enokido et al. discuss their previous work based upon a pair of power consumption-based (PCB) and transmission rate-based (TRB) algorithms and propose an extended power consumption-based (EPCB) algorithm. They proposed the PCB and TRB algorithms to select a server with minimum total power consumption in communication-based applications. Additionally, the PCB was found to be more useful in this regard. However, during their previous study, they tried to ascertain only the amount of electric power a server is expected to consume to transmit a file to a new requesting client with the PCB algorithm. The authors have extended their work and L. Barolli (&) Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Fukuoka Institute of Technology (FIT), 3-30-1 Wajiro-Higashi, Higashi-Ku, Fukuoka 811-0295, Japan e-mail: barolli@fit.ac.jp