What is a Cyber-Physical System: Definitions and models spectrum

Abstract

Each time a relevant proposal occurs, existing perspectives, concepts or fundamentals are confronted by emergent ones. The Industry 4.0 and its promoted production control systems based on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), made splash new potentials for the binomial human and technology (equipments and its settings). Several authors explore the envisaged required more physical and digital connection to announce interesting transformative changes, where self-configure and adaptive machines sustain the application of corrective decisions. This paper exposes a spectrum of existing CPS definitions and models and contributes with the fundamentals for an effective intelligent CPS (I-CPS), where a double loop learning process, allows its supporting software algorithms to be changed or reprogrammed. Instead, not only self-configure machines but its configuring software, too.