Cyber-Physical-Social Systems: A State-of-the-Art Survey, Challenges and Opportunities

It is the overriding trend of the present-day world that traditional systems and mobile devices are currently transforming into intelligent systems and smart devices. Against this backdrop, cyber-physical systems (CPSs) and Internet-of-Things (IoT) emerge as the times require. To achieve the parallel interactions between the human world and the computer network, IoT along with wireless mobile communication and computing open up some future opportunities as well as challenges for constructing a novel cyber-physical-social system (CPSS) that takes human factors into account during the system operation and management. In this article, a brief comprehensive survey is provided on some of the current research work that contributes to enabling CPSSs. Some crucial aspects of CPSSs are identified, including: the development from CPSs to CPSSs, architecture design, applications, standards, real-world case studies, enabling techniques and networks for CPSSs. To lay a foundation for the development of the upcoming smart world, we further propose a virtualization architecture and an integrated framework of caching, computing and networking for CPSSs. Simulations verify the performance improvement of the proposals. At last, some research issues with challenges and possible solutions are unearthed for researchers in the related research areas.