Survey of CPS Platforms

Platforum\Survey of CPS Platforms
We observe a tremendously increasing number of CPS-related platforms and initiatives, leading to a situation that can be described as a modern day “CPS Babylon” (e.g. only for the IoT market, more than 360 platforms could be identified). Thus, we conducted an expert survey to get a big picture of the current CPS landscape and the various types of CPS platforms.

What do we find when generally searching for CPS platforms?


Below you see some examples of CPS-related platforms we found when we prepared our survey. The examples are structured according to an organizational, operational or technical point of view and with respect to an increasing scope, from small-scale to global approaches:

Fig 1

Which types of CPS platforms could we identify?

Focusing on operational platforms (communities dealing with standards or architectures) and on technical platforms (CPS platforms in the narrow sense), we could distinguish between 15 types of platforms:

Fig 2

(Here you can find some mapping results from ConnectedFactories, specifically for digital manufacturing platforms.)

These 15 types of CPS platforms could be clustered into four main categories, supporting varying tasks during the development or “life-cycle” stage of a CPS:

  1. At an early “life-cycle” stage, research activities, community building and standardization occur in different technological fields and different domains (=> European Technology Platforms, funded projects, standardization initiatives, etc.)
  2. The design of CPS is a central characteristic of some of the surveyed platforms at an advanced stage (=> e.g. hardware development platforms including software aspects such as e.g. Intel Galileo or product development platforms such as e.g. Siemens TIA)
  3. The operational phase of CPS and their orchestration are the third aspect which could be observed (=> IT systems such as e.g. the OSIsoft PI System or FactoryTalk directly support process optimization with increased operational intelligence)
  4. At the final stage, many market places and IoT platforms of CPS-assets have been observed (=> there is a tremendously increasing number of platforms with a focus on new businesses and services e.g. by analyzing data coming from CPS; for an overview consult e.g. UNIFY-IoT report on IoT platform activities)

What are our main findings of the CPS platform survey?

  • High presence of US-based IoT/IT solutions in the market
  • Several “organizational” platforms in EU, reflecting efforts of European Commission to European platform building
  • Technical platforms from the US are more cross-cutting and market oriented
  • European technical platforms have a more problem- and domain-specific focus
  • European platforms are more “open” than the US platforms
  • Common challenges (e.g. modeling and simulation of CPS) could be identified across the domain-specific platforms, opening up the potential for cross-sectoral platform building within Europe


Here you find the whole CPS platforms survey report. Based on this survey, Platforms4CPS created a CPS Compass and Repository of common Aspects & Building Blocks for all people which are interested in effectively exploiting emerging CPS technologies and approaches.

Your feedback is welcome!

We invite you to give your appreciated feedback on the presented results here.
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