ABSTRACT
The fast-evolving technology and tremendous growth in adaptation to the technology in every-day life, even by people at the grass-roots level, has made it inevitable that cyber physical systems (CPS) are available to support every aspect of life.
Being one of the core components of the fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0, CPS integrates social computing and industrial Internet of Things (IoT) into a single platform to leverage interaction, cooperation and learning from multiple layers of physical and logical systems.
The predominant shift towards widely used physical components empowered by cyber capabilities, and the amount of data available over its integration with other systems, shows the path ahead in realising smarter cities in our neighbourhood.
Every initiative has a few drivers to “fire the gas”, as does CPS for smart cities, of which several are:
Quality of life
Demand vs supply
Opportunity
Before a vision can be fulfilled, many challenges need to be addressed. Challenges faced in the realization of smart cities include:
Security
Dynamics
Replication
With drive from technological inventors and awareness of the benefits of CPS in the social world, it is inevitable that such challenges will be addressed, and smart cities will be a reality in the near future. A smart city, built in conjunction with technology, will provide a sustainable, reliable and safe community, as well as opening up new opportunities and the need for a skilled workforce. The pace at which we are moving towards realizing the vision of smart cities is overwhelming and, along with it, comes the responsibility to do it right.
Every revolution has provided mankind with remarkable developments and we will have to wait and see what this fourth revolution has in store for us.
This chapter, Building Cyber Physical Systems in the Context of Smart Cities, acts as a high-level introduction to the importance of CPS, highlighting the key physical processes that drive the development of the smart city and the requirements for deploying cyber physical systems to support smart cities, their challenges and opportunities.
