Introduction

In the wake of the rapid developments in computer and communication technologies, network-based communication and control technologies have played important roles in many industrial control applications, such as manufacturing plants, power plants, automobiles, aircrafts, robot manipulators and so on. The cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are new class of networked embedded systems, and tightly integrate computation, networking, and physical processes. Different from the traditional point-to-point system architecture, CPSs are spatially distributed systems, and the signals between the system components are transmitted via a communication network, such as the remote control of several mobile units, arrays of micro-actuators and underwater acoustics.