Introduction
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are becoming central to modern industrial automation, critical infrastructure, transport, aerospace, healthcare, energy, robotics, smart manufacturing, autonomous systems, and other domains where computing, communication, control, and physical processes are tightly integrated. As CPS become more interconnected, software-defined, intelligent, and safety-relevant, failures may propagate across software, hardware, networks, sensors, actuators, data-processing components, and physical processes. This creates significant challenges for reliability, dependability, safety, security, resilience, and assurance.
Reliability assurance for CPS cannot be reduced to conventional software testing or isolated hardware validation. It requires integrated methods that combine embedded system design, fault tolerance, formal and semi-formal verification, model-based engineering, probabilistic reliability assessment, run-time monitoring, digital twins, deterministic computing, fault injection, hardware-software co-design, and evidence-based assurance. Particular attention is needed for CPS developed using C/C++, FPGA-based platforms, edge/embedded computing architectures, AI-enabled components, and real-time control systems, where numerical correctness, physical consistency, timing predictability, and robustness against hardware-, software-, and environment-induced faults are essential.
This book invites original research, review, methodological, tool-oriented, experimental, and practice-oriented chapters that address reliability assurance of cyber-physical systems across their design, verification, validation, deployment, certification, and operational lifecycle. Contributions from different countries, institutions, disciplines, application domains, and research traditions are welcome. The editors particularly encourage chapters that combine rigorous technical contributions with practical relevance for real-world CPS applications.