1.1 Introduction
Cyber physical systems (CPSs) are the class of systems that find applications in various day-to-day domains like healthcare, academia, industry, etc. Their popularity has been growing. This is evident from the numerous survey articles, where CPS is the main theme. In Ref. [1], the authors discussed history of CPS, its relation with various research fields, different types of domain-specific applications and challenges in CPS. In Ref. [2], the author discussed about the state-of-the-art CPS in Industry 4.0 through 595 articles extracted from the Web of Science (WoS) database. This work focused on the industrial applications of CPS, uncovering the research trends and its challenges in Industry 4.0. Also, in another survey of CPS [3], the author presented a comprehensive overview of CPS based on the 77 articles collected from Scopus database. This survey article illustrated the role of CPS and its challenges in ten research categories, viz., agriculture, education, energy management, environmental monitoring, intelligent transportation, medical devices and systems, process control, security, smart city and smart home, and smart manufacturing. In Ref. [4], the authors shed a light on the survey of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) with a perspective of CPS. It also discussed the architecture, applications, characteristics and challenges of IIOT.
CPSs consist of mainly (i) the physical computing units along with advanced connectivity to ensure the real-time data acquisition and information feedback from cyber space, and (ii) capabilities for data management, analytics and computations [5]. As the sensors are being increasingly embedded in almost all the industrial processes owing to advent of Industry 4.0, data collection is no longer a challenge. The challenge is rather a smart and intelligent processing of this data, which can be achieved by employing the smart devices, technology, etc. Smart devices, technology, objects and any software, regardless of its application domain, that epitomize artificial intelligence (AI) can be clubbed under the umbrella of the “smart computing (SC)”. Although the areas of the CPS and SC have been going on hand-to-hand with each other for numerous years, little has been said about their amalgamation.
So, with this aim in mind, we present in this book chapter a bibliometric analysis of the CPSs and the SC. We have used the WoS as our primary source for data/research publication collection. We found that 4,538 publications surfaced with search criteria set as “cyber physical system” and “smart computing”. We have also analysed the research data along with various other dimensions like annual publications, types of publications, possible future research directions, countries and authors. Then, we have performed analysis along with the dimension of cooperation networks such as authors, countries, organizations, etc. Finally, we have also performed the analysis about the citation structure and the burst detection.
Therefore, the scope of the current chapter/work in the nutshell is discussed in the following.
Using the WoS database, we have analysed
- Number of annual publications in the field of CPS and SC for the past 10 years (2010–2020).
- Types of publications such as book chapters, journal papers, etc.
- Top journals/sources of publications.
- Top research directions for CPS and SC. These include the computer science, engineering, telecommunications, etc. Further, an analysis on the trend in these research directions has also been put forth.
- Top countries and ...
