Last year in 2016, the Japanese government put into practice the 5th Science and Technology Basic Plan. It focuses the development of the society towards a ‘Super Smart Society', the Society 5.0. The underlying concept is that the rapid development & deployment of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) allows the combination of cyber space with the physical space. The combination of both are so called ‘Cyber Physical Systems (CPS)', physical objects of the real world enhanced and combined with information which is expected to bring about a major shift in the Japanese society.

A ‘Super Smart Society' is a society in which the different needs of members are distinctly met through the provision of the relevant goods and services in the desired amount to the people who need them, and in which the entire people can be assessable to top notch services and live a convenient, vibrant life that considers their differences such as age, gender, religion or language.

CPS is an essential basic technology to realize "super smart society". Now is the time to promote CPS research and innovation at an accelerating pace to activate Japanese industrial competitiveness.

The purpose of this special issue is to clarify the scientific, technological and political concept of ‘CPS' and identify those of critical challenges relevant to CPS. Amongst such a concept as Industrie 4.0, IoT etc., CPS related technologies are expected to realize a smart society. We have not been, however, still answering these questions well: How should the Japan's science and technology policy for CPS research be? How to accelerate the investment toward the CPS related industries and improve the competitiveness of them? How should we design an innovation eco-system of CPS to realize the smart society?

To build a systematic and large-scale ‘CPS system of systems', which ought to enclose a variety of needs and requirements occurred from a wide range of users, the open innovation policy must be applied adequately across conventional stakeholders: the public-private partnership and cross industrial collaboration that aimed at the formation of the eco-system would be indispensable. Under the special issue, we are able not only to understand the advanced CPS policy of Europe and US, but also to gain the deep comprehension of the technical characteristics of CPS.

It would be great if this special issue would be a reference for planning the science and technology policies related to CPS.

With a rise of social interests for preservation of global environment and efficient use of resources, the innovation of technology is required to realize the smart system mainly for social infrastructures. This paper clarifies the concept of smartness and explains the difference between the large-scale engineering system and the smart system. In order to show the image of smart system, the requirements and technology realizing them of smartness are described concretely on the smart mobility as an example. The smart system integrates various systems with different characteristic. Then it is called the cyber physical system (CPS) in the field of system theory. On the CPS as a system model of the smart system, are explained its basic concept, control function, system structure and autonomy which features CPS and is required for realization. For the development of CPS applications for smart systems, their feasibility is discussed on autonomous subsystems, networking and information technology (NIT) supporting CPS and control technology establishing smartness. The possible course of technical developments is concluded for the practical implementation of smart systems in future.

Cyber-physical Systems (CPS), appeared early in the 21^st century, introduced new views to information and communication technologies (ICT) for constructing software-rich social infrastructure. After a DARPA-funded SEC research program, which focused on developing an information technology for dynamical systems, NSF's CPS aimed to establish a new fundamental view, in which closed loops govern systems of strongly coupled components. The CPS research program enumerated three major technical challenges, co-existence of continuous and discrete signals, extracting valuable information from large datasets with uncertainty, and connectivity-based computing infrastructure. Furthermore, invisible closed loops leading to tightly coupled components are to be eliminated so that serious failures are avoided. CPS will be an enabler for IoT-based business eco-systems and super-smart societies.

CPS (Cyber-Physical System) is expected to be an initiator of next-generation innovation, and it's elemental and practical researches are advanced mainly in Europe and the United States. Japanese government's Society 5.0 program needs CPS technologies as its base, but the definition of CPS seems different from other countries. In this paper the history of CPS is studied carefully from its origins to the current global trends.

The global trends of CPS lead by Europe and the United States are 1) illustrated as next-generation embedded systems 2) cross-sectoral and common basic technologies 3) streamlined research schema have been developed from elemental to practical 4) elemental researches are multi-disciplinary.

It is difficult to find such a direction in Japanese policy, although its focuses are on IoT, AI, Big Data. The reasons are analyzed and some issues are pointed out in this paper.

‘The world is changing from embedded system to CPS, and then IoT'.

In the era of System of Systems (SoSs) where every physical thing is inter-connected each other and bring new values to the society, it is dispensable for the society to form new innovation- ecosystem for cultivating the value smartly. In response, consortium such as ARTEMIS, ECSEL, and AIOTI have been organized via the form of public-private partnership under the initiative of the European Commission. It indicates the direction of different stakeholders smoothly and is crucial activity to draw a cooperative contribution amongst them towards the creation of new eco-s-system. In this paper, we confirm that the design concept of the European Commission based on the formation of such an ecosystem is being transformed into a ‘Virtual Vertical Integrated' one.

Recent data-centric technologies push the fusion of two industrial groups, data generators (e.g. manufacturing and consumer services) and data processors (e.g. IT and net services). The mixture of two sectors forms the new industrial structure, IoT ecosystem. The investment of AI accelerates this structural change as it provides the grand framework for new services in IoT ecosystem with the commoditization of IoT devices and big data technology. Firms try to adapt themselves to the new environment, but they often experience the difficulties because this fusion wants their business regime and organization drastically change. Data-centric technologies easily connect two services that used to be for totally different users, and they also give a new role for business units to exploit the opportunities. Firms need to deal with this change, carefully eyeing the human resource and organizational structure of their firms and also noticing the competition landscape from macro perspectives.

The purpose of this study is to visualize the technological evolutionary process of cyber physical system (CPS) concepts for the aeronautical industry and to extract the essential characteristics. 40 cases of CPS concepts were divided into the four stages of a) research, b) development, c) commercialization, and d) industrialization in order to provide visibility to the evolutionary process. In doing so, we analyzed the process of how element technologies are applied to products and services and how they then evolve into service platforms. We discovered that that many simulation models have been developed for integrating multiple technology domains in the process of transitioning from the research phase to the development phase, and this eventually contributes to the creation of CPS-related business models in the commercialization phase. Moreover, new partnerships are formed with IT companies in responding to CPS implementation, which results in service platforms that did not previously exist.

This paper explains the history and future of automotive embedded systems from the viewpoint of Cyber Physical System (CPS) and describes the development issues of embedded control systems focused on the model-based development and difficulties of specification definition.

Many discussions on Platforms or two-sided market so far focused on Business and Technolgoy separately, using mainly Western IT cases. And there are also few cases which deal with now-a-day's technological trend like IoT among them. This paper took up the case of platform building by Komatsu, a maker of construction machines (devices) to analyze it from the perspective of CPS, especially focusing on data feedbackloop. As a result, it found at least 6 points important; (1) installed base of devices and their SW are prerequisite for platform building, (2) aggressive open innovation is used for acquisition of technology which Komatsu dosen't have, (3) customer-orientation discussed in Service dominant Logic would greatly contribute on getting lots of information from users for attractive solutions, (4) Rental and Maintenance Services enable Komatsu to keep asset value and control information inflow, (5) these all enrich their business model positions, (6) Komatsu platform initially is built as closed system but there is possibility left to open it by using standard networks.

This paper deals with a process of changing competitive factors based on a Nintendo case study in a stationary game console industry. An existence game console has been developed under a product concept "high-performance game machine" with high speed CPU and GPU. On the other hand, Nintendo could not only reduce CPU and GPU performance but also emphasize the new competitive factors of communication tool for family with the simple operability of controller and family friendly game software. In other words, it proposed new product concept "the game machine by which family can play".

This paper focuses on a fundamental technology and examine the hypothetical product development process of the firm without fundamental technology. As Nintendo has not owned the fundamental technology, the necessity which searched differentiation factors caused new competitive factor creation.