Cyber-physical Systems

Preface

This book has been written as an introductory text to cyber‐physical systems conceptualized as a scientific object in itself. The decision to move in this direction was based on my subjective experience of the objective reality of engineering education and academic research, very often overspecialized and too modular. I tried to go beyond such a reductionist view by making evident the complex articulations that constitute cyber‐physical systems as such, as well as the necessary relations to the external world in which they are – or will be – deployed, being them physical or social. My advise to anyone who wants to learn or teach from this book is (i) to follow the chapters in the order they are presented, (ii) do the proposed exercises, and (iii) keep the mind open to understand the articulation of concepts that define the presented theory. Only in this way, the reader or educator can fully enjoy the strength of the theory as the basis of a methodological framework for practical interventions.

The history of the manuscript is the following. The very first, preliminary version of the manuscript‐to‐be was presented as tutorial notes in the 2017 International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems in Bologna (Italy). Then, this tutorial text was extended to become the lecture notes of a completely new course I had the freedom to develop at LUT as soon as I moved from the University of Oulu to LUT in 2018; the course is called Introduction of IoT‐based Systems. In ...