Call for Papers

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Cloud-Fog Automation is a newly proposed digitalized industrial automation architecture enabled by next-generation communications, which represents a fundamental paradigm shift from the traditional ISA-95 model. The overarching goal is to accelerate the convergence and synergy of communications, computing, and control towards next-generation industrial cyber-physical systems. It is a network-centric architecture, where cloud and fog technologies are leveraged collaboratively to achieve determinism in connectivity, networked computing, and intelligent networked control. Consequently, industrial applications can be realized independent of vendor-specific hardware and software, and further provided as a service with varying degrees of technical and infrastructural requirements, translating into significant business benefits. With the deployment of new wireless technologies to empower almost-deterministic ultra-reliable low-latency communications, a joint design of optimal control and resource management techniques is emerging for time-critical industrial cyber-physical systems, and it is also imperative that functional safety and security of such systems are not compromised. Another focus will be on system-wide/application-level performance, driven by “goal-oriented communication” in the underlying communication technologies. There are currently many open research challenges to enable Cloud-Fog Automation, therefore, a deliberate rethink and research in co-designing and synergizing communications, computing, and control is required. Specifically, research in deterministic industrial networking, computing virtualization, and networked control/estimation for time-sensitive cyber-physical systems will open many potential avenues for novel applications, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI)-empowered digital twins, industrial robots, virtual and augmented reality in advanced manufacturing, and so forth.

This Special Issue aims to provide a forum for the latest advances in industrial communications, computing and control co-design, and endeavors to promote research, innovations, and applications to bridge the gap between theory and applications. We solicit high-quality original research papers on topics including, but not limited to:

• Novel design metrics and optimization methodologies for communication, computing, and control co-design in next-generation industrial cyber-physical systems with Cloud-Fog Automation
• Co-design of new industrial wireless technologies with industrial control systems and computing frameworks using cross-layer optimization techniques
• Co-design of network softwarization architectures with control and computing requirements embedded for interoperability, heterogeneity, reproducibility and scalability
• Co-design of virtualization technologies tightly coupled with communication stacks and control applications using optimal network scheduling and intelligent control algorithms
• Co-design of communication and computing approaches for ensuring functional safety and creating cyber-secure control systems
• Co-design of communication, computing, and control paradigms for efficient resource orchestration, sharing, service provisioning and management
• Clean-slate designs of wireless networked control systems that are natively supported by industrial communications and computing architectures with robust performance
• Tight integration of security and privacy-preserving solutions across communications, computing, and control domains for system integrity

Submission Guidelines

Prospective authors should submit their manuscripts following the IEEE JSAC guidelines. Papers should be submitted through EDAS according to the following schedule.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission: 31 August 2024
First Notification: 30 November 2024
Acceptance Notification: 28 February 2025
Final Manuscript Due: 15 March 2025
Publication Date: Second Quarter 2025

Guest Editors

Jiong Jin (Lead Editor)
Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Zhibo Pang
ABB Corporate Research, Sweden
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Jonathan Kua
Deakin University, Australia

Quanyan Zhu
New York University, USA

Karl Johansson
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Nikolaj Marchenko
Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany

Dave Cavalcanti
Intel Corporation, USA