In recent years, the capabilities of contemporary mobile devices have been improving a lot. These capabilities, such as significant computational resources, multiple communication radios, various sensor modules, and high level programming languages, enable mobile devices to form mobile cyber-physical system (CPS) in our daily lives. Mobile CPS integrates distributed sensing with computing and ubiquitous connectivity of Internet. Also, mobile CPS coordinates computational, virtual, and physical resources and facilitates the interaction of digital world with physical world, potentially driving the pervasive effect in the citizens’ everyday life anytime and anywhere. Thus, mobile CPS could provide a convenient and economical platform that facilitates sophisticated and ubiquitous intelligent applications between humans and the surrounding physical world.

Mobile CPS could find applicability in multiple areas and disciplines, including (but not limited to) (1) mobile intelligent robots and robotics systems, making use of multiple smart sensors, mobile devices, intelligent service, cloud robots, and so on, to improve efficiency and scalability in processing of complex tasks that are impossible under local resource constraints in different application areas; (2) intelligent transportation systems, for example, leveraging sensing, computing, and communication capabilities with control vehicles in the physical world to deal with the challenges of safe (e.g., decreasing time latency of reaction in traffic accidents), efficient, and green transportations; and (3) smart living technologies, for example, smart city, environmental monitoring, healthcare systems, and smart grid, which improve intelligence, convenience, operational safety, and green energy of human society. Software defined solutions, ubiquitous and distributed system, cloud computing, social networks, security and privacy, human centric computing, and other methodologies and technologies which can be applied to mobile CPS are also welcome.

The purpose of this special issue aims to involve multidiscipline research contributions of unpublished research on the recent methodologies, innovations, and experimental validations regarding mobile CPS, so as to facilitate the real-world deployment of such systems in the future.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Architectural platform for distributed mobile CPS
• Mobile intelligent robots and robotics systems
• Software defined solutions for mobile CPS
• Smart living and smart grid technologies
• Human centric computing in mobile CPS
• Vehicular networks and intelligent transportation systems
• Evaluations and solutions for security, privacy, and reliability issues of mobile CPS
• Distributed smart systems and applications
• Mobile crowdsensing and crowdsourcing
• Mobile social networks and pervasive applications
• Mobile and ubiquitous cloud computing
• Mobile service-oriented and ubiquitous computing
• Design and cross-layer optimization for mobile CPS
• Heterogeneous networking in mobile CPS
• Intelligent information processing for mobile CPS
• Big data analytics in mobile CPS
• Data mining, machine learning, and complex system design for mobile CPS
• Scalable monitoring systems with mobile wireless networks
• Resource management in mobile CPS
• Experience for real-world deployments of mobile CPS