Cyber-physical systems (CPS) is a field that encompasses various computational and engineering disciplines, such as complex networks and communications, control, information fusion, signal processing, optimization, and computer science, as well as their applications. The increasing number of complex system applications, together with more requirements and demands for system intelligence, flexibility, adaptability, robustness, and resilience, are revealing new theoretical and technological challenges for advanced cyber-physical systems.

A major challenge is the need for innovative frameworks and algorithms to deal with complex cyber-physical systems. Increasing complexities can be due to complex components, for example, some applications of advanced robot manipulators, sensor networks, multi-agent systems, human-in-the-loop systems, and also complex environments. In particular, as unstructured environments in manufacturing with multi-spatial and temporal scales, uncertain human-robot interaction in the complex healthcare system, or intelligent control and multi-modal information fusion in large-scale complex distributed systems, are the urgent problem to be solved. These theoretical, methodological, or practical focus complexities make high-precision and reliable real-time performance difficult to achieve and therefore require the design and development of novel methods for cyber-physical systems. Advancements in cyber-physical systems will provide engineering systems with new capabilities that far exceed today’s levels of intelligence, autonomy, functionality, adaptability, robustness and cybersecurity.

This Special Issue will present advances in complex cyber-physical systems and provide a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art theories, applications, and challenges for future research from both theoretical and engineering aspects. Authors are encouraged to submit papers that discuss new directions in the way of original research in the field of complex cyber-physical systems. Review articles are also encouraged.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Adaptive and robust control for complex cyber-physical systems
• Computational methods for internet-of-things-based cyber-physical systems
• Agent-based modeling and activity recognition in complex human-robot interaction
• Analytical methods of design, modeling and evaluation of complex cyber-physical systems
• Artificial Intelligence-based analysis, modeling, optimization and evaluation for complex cyber-physical systems
• Smart Interactions in complex cyber-physical systems: Humans, Agents, Robots, Machines and Sensors
• Complex networks of wired and wireless for human-machine systems
• Applications of data science for complex cyber-physical systems
• Cyber transportation and human interaction with mobile robots
• Intelligent hardware devices and software algorithms in complex cyber-physical systems
• Multimodal and multichannel signal processing and information fusion in complex cyber-physical systems
• Cyber-physical systems in the industry, healthcare, and social areas