Cyber-physical systems, internet of things and big data

Advances in wireless communication, in computing and in sensing devices, along with the cost reduction of these technologies, have prompted and accelerated the development of Cyber-Physical Systems that adopt the Internet of Things paradigm to provide several types of services, such as surveillance, weather monitoring, management of vehicular traffic, control of production activities, etc. The development and the adoption of these systems are still facing various challenges that the research community and the industry are actively trying to solve. On one hand, the development challenges are mainly related to security, robustness, availability, adequate performance and energy consumption optimization. On the other hand, the use of these systems produces large amounts of fine-grained data that need to be processed and interrelated, typically requiring big data analytics for the extraction of useful knowledge that can be used by the software services controlling these systems. This paper introduces the novel contributions for the design, implementation and use of these systems, which are part of the special issue on Cyber-Physical Systems, Internet of Things and Big Data.