Guest Editorial on Advances in Tools and Techniques for Enabling Cyber-Physical-Social Systems - Part I

C YBER–physical–social systems (CPSS) integrate computational physical elements (seamless integration of computational algorithms and physical components) capable of interacting with, reflecting and influencing each other as well as the complicated system and information exhibited by human’s social behavior. Rapid advances in mobile cloud computing, man–machine, machine–machine communications, smart phone networks will cause a new paradigm shift in CPSS design, applications, and operations by bringing improvements not only to the quality of service (QoS) but also to quality of experiment (QoE) and quality of protection (QoP) in terms of the cost efficiency, reliability, security, and energy efficiency from the human perspective of view. The integration of cyber–physical systems and social networks also provides a novel platform to addresses challenges in cyber– physical–social interactions and human-centric technologies development by using powerful tools such as social computing, social cooperation, and social sensing. Application examples of employing mobile computing in CPSS include traffic accidents detection in smart transportation, energy management in smart grid, health monitoring and evaluation. The introduction of social elements into CPS poses new system design challenges and open research issues. Therefore, safety and reliability requirements of physical components are qualitatively different from general-purpose distributed computing infrastructures and lack of consistent and unified system modeling and design principles. Resources in data centers and cloud infrastructures have to be efficiently managed and scheduled to optimize reliability and scalability of CPSS under various constraints of QoE and QoP. Besides, CPSS are expected to deal with data directly coming from trans-domain applications, which could be in different forms such as GPS coordinates, flood level, temperature, rainfall rate, vehicle speed, electricity consumption. How to coordinate various applications of heterogeneous systems and facilitate a deeper integration, interaction, and personalization of the physical, cyber, and social domains is another important challenge. This Special Issue on CPSS devoted to recent addressing these challenges. A Call for Papers was issued in early 2015, with the submission deadline set to June 15, 2015. We have received overwhelming submissions, and ultimately seven high-quality papers have been selected in the first part of this special issue. The papers can be broadly classified according to their primary focus. Papers in the first group aim at facilitating the social network technologies into the CPS using mobile social