The Role of Field Data for Analyzing the Dependability of Short Range Wireless Technologies

Abstract. The migration from mobile to ubiquitous Internet is at hand, due to the intense growth of short range wireless technologies. Users accessing the Internet through wireless devices are increasing, if compared to "wired" ones, and they expect the same dependability level they already experience on wired networks, that is high quality "always on" wireless networks. But how can we analyze the dependability level of a wireless network? Direct analysis of failures from the field of application is an effective practice to understand the actual dependability behavior of an operational system. However, despite its wide use over the last four decades on a large variety of systems, field data analysis has rarely been applied to wireless networks. Through the experience gained from extensive failure analysis of Bluetooth networks, the article shows how field failure data can play a key role to fill the gap on understanding the dependability behavior of wireless networks

On Dependable Wireless Communications through Multi-Connectivity

The realization of wireless ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) is one of the key challenges of the fifth generation (5G) of mobile communications systems and beyond. Ensuring ultra-high reliability together with a latency in the (sub-)millisecond range is expected to enable self-driving cars, wireless factory automation, and the Tactile Internet. In wireless communications, reliability is usually only considered as percentage of successful packet delivery, aiming for 1 − 10⁻⁵ up to 1 − 10⁻⁹ in URLLC

Dependability Assessment of Wireless Sensor Networks with Formal Methods

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are increasingly being adopted in critical applications, where verifying the correct operation of sensor nodes is a major concern. Undesired events, such as node crash and packet loss, may undermine the dependability of the WSN. Hence their effects need to be properly assessed from the early stages of the development process onwards to minimize the chances of unexpected problems during use. It is also necessary to monitor the system during operation in order to avoid unexpected results or dangerous effects. In this thesis we propose a framework to investigate the correctness of the design of a WSN from the point of view of its dependability, i.e., resilience to undesired events. The framework is based on the Event Calculus formalism and it is backed-up by a support tool aimed to simplify its adoption by system designers. The tool allows to specify the target WSN in a user-friendly way and it is able to generate automatically the Event Calculus specifications used to check correctness properties and evaluate dependability metrics, such as connection resiliency, coverage and lifetime. It is able to work at design time and runtime. In particular at runtime the tool works a server that is in waiting for new events coming from the WSN and, performed the reasoning using the same specifications, is able to do prediction about future criticalities of the WSN. The effectiveness of the approach is shown in the context of five case studies, aiming to illustrate how the framework is helpful to drive design choices by means of what-if scenario analysis and robustness checking, and to check the correctness properties of the WSN at runtime

Internet of Robotic Things Intelligent Connectivity and Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) have developed rapidly in the past few years, as both the Internet and “things” have evolved significantly. “Things” now range from simple Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices to smart wireless sensors, intelligent wireless sensors and actuators, robotic things, and autonomous vehicles operating in consumer, business, and industrial environments. The emergence of “intelligent things” (static or mobile) in collaborative autonomous fleets requires new architectures, connectivity paradigms, trustworthiness frameworks, and platforms for the integration of applications across different business and industrial domains. These new applications accelerate the development of autonomous system design paradigms and the proliferation of the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT). In IoRT, collaborative robotic things can communicate with other things, learn autonomously, interact safely with the environment, humans and other things, and gain qualities like self-maintenance, self-awareness, self-healing, and fail-operational behavior. IoRT applications can make use of the individual, collaborative, and collective intelligence of robotic things, as well as information from the infrastructure and operating context to plan, implement and accomplish tasks under different environmental conditions and uncertainties. The continuous, real-time interaction with the environment makes perception, location, communication, cognition, computation, connectivity, propulsion, and integration of federated IoRT and digital platforms important components of new-generation IoRT applications. This paper reviews the taxonomy of the IoRT, emphasizing the IoRT intelligent connectivity, architectures, interoperability, and trustworthiness framework, and surveys the technologies that enable the application of the IoRT across different domains to perform missions more efficiently, productively, and completely. The aim is to provide a novel perspective on the IoRT that involves communication among robotic things and humans and highlights the convergence of several technologies and interactions between different taxonomies used in the literature.publishedVersio

On Age-of-Information Aware Resource Allocation for Industrial Control-Communication-Codesign

Unter dem Überbegriff Industrie 4.0 wird in der industriellen Fertigung die zunehmende Digitalisierung und Vernetzung von industriellen Maschinen und Prozessen zusammengefasst. Die drahtlose, hoch-zuverlässige, niedrig-latente Kommunikation (engl. ultra-reliable low-latency communication, URLLC) – als Bestandteil von 5G gewährleistet höchste Dienstgüten, die mit industriellen drahtgebundenen Technologien vergleichbar sind und wird deshalb als Wegbereiter von Industrie 4.0 gesehen. Entgegen diesem Trend haben eine Reihe von Arbeiten im Forschungsbereich der vernetzten Regelungssysteme (engl. networked control systems, NCS) gezeigt, dass die hohen Dienstgüten von URLLC nicht notwendigerweise erforderlich sind, um eine hohe Regelgüte zu erzielen. Das Co-Design von Kommunikation und Regelung ermöglicht eine gemeinsame Optimierung von Regelgüte und Netzwerkparametern durch die Aufweichung der Grenze zwischen Netzwerk- und Applikationsschicht. Durch diese Verschränkung wird jedoch eine fundamentale (gemeinsame) Neuentwicklung von Regelungssystemen und Kommunikationsnetzen nötig, was ein Hindernis für die Verbreitung dieses Ansatzes darstellt. Stattdessen bedient sich diese Dissertation einem Co-Design-Ansatz, der beide Domänen weiterhin eindeutig voneinander abgrenzt, aber das Informationsalter (engl. age of information, AoI) als bedeutenden Schnittstellenparameter ausnutzt. Diese Dissertation trägt dazu bei, die Echtzeitanwendungszuverlässigkeit als Folge der Überschreitung eines vorgegebenen Informationsalterschwellenwerts zu quantifizieren und fokussiert sich dabei auf den Paketverlust als Ursache. Anhand der Beispielanwendung eines fahrerlosen Transportsystems wird gezeigt, dass die zeitlich negative Korrelation von Paketfehlern, die in heutigen Systemen keine Rolle spielt, für Echtzeitanwendungen äußerst vorteilhaft ist. Mit der Annahme von schnellem Schwund als dominanter Fehlerursache auf der Luftschnittstelle werden durch zeitdiskrete Markovmodelle, die für die zwei Netzwerkarchitekturen Single-Hop und Dual-Hop präsentiert werden, Kommunikationsfehlerfolgen auf einen Applikationsfehler abgebildet. Diese Modellierung ermöglicht die analytische Ableitung von anwendungsbezogenen Zuverlässigkeitsmetriken wie die durschnittliche Dauer bis zu einem Fehler (engl. mean time to failure). Für Single-Hop-Netze wird das neuartige Ressourcenallokationsschema State-Aware Resource Allocation (SARA) entwickelt, das auf dem Informationsalter beruht und die Anwendungszuverlässigkeit im Vergleich zu statischer Multi-Konnektivität um Größenordnungen erhöht, während der Ressourcenverbrauch im Bereich von konventioneller Einzelkonnektivität bleibt. Diese Zuverlässigkeit kann auch innerhalb eines Systems von Regelanwendungen, in welchem mehrere Agenten um eine begrenzte Anzahl Ressourcen konkurrieren, statistisch garantiert werden, wenn die Anzahl der verfügbaren Ressourcen pro Agent um ca. 10 % erhöht werden. Für das Dual-Hop Szenario wird darüberhinaus ein Optimierungsverfahren vorgestellt, das eine benutzerdefinierte Kostenfunktion minimiert, die niedrige Anwendungszuverlässigkeit, hohes Informationsalter und hohen durchschnittlichen Ressourcenverbrauch bestraft und so das benutzerdefinierte optimale SARA-Schema ableitet. Diese Optimierung kann offline durchgeführt und als Look-Up-Table in der unteren Medienzugriffsschicht zukünftiger industrieller Drahtlosnetze implementiert werden.:1. Introduction 1 1.1. The Need for an Industrial Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.2. Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2. Related Work 7 2.1. Communications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 2.2. Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.3. Codesign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 2.3.1. The Need for Abstraction – Age of Information . . . . . . . . 11 2.4. Dependability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2.5. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 3. Deriving Proper Communications Requirements 17 3.1. Fundamentals of Control Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 3.1.1. Sampling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 3.1.2. Performance Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 3.1.3. Packet Losses and Delay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 3.2. Joint Design of Control Loop with Packet Losses . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 3.2.1. Method 1: Reduced Sampling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 3.2.2. Method 2: Markov Jump Linear System . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 3.2.3. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 3.3. Focus Application: The AGV Use Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 3.3.1. Control Loop Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 3.3.2. Control Performance Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 3.3.3. Joint Modeling: Applying Reduced Sampling . . . . . . . . . . 34 3.3.4. Joint Modeling: Applying MJLS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 3.4. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 4. Modeling Control-Communication Failures 43 4.1. Communication Assumptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 4.1.1. Small-Scale Fading as a Cause of Failure . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 4.1.2. Connectivity Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 4.2. Failure Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 4.2.1. Single-hop network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 4.2.2. Dual-hop network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 4.3. Performance Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 4.3.1. Mean Time to Failure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 4.3.2. Packet Loss Ratio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 4.3.3. Average Number of Assigned Channels . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 4.3.4. Age of Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 4.4. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 5. Single Hop – Single Agent 61 5.1. State-Aware Resource Allocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 5.2. Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 5.3. Erroneous Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 5.4. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 6. Single Hop – Multiple Agents 71 6.1. Failure Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 6.1.1. Admission Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 6.1.2. Transition Probabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 6.1.3. Computational Complexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 6.1.4. Performance Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 6.2. Illustration Scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 6.3. Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 6.3.1. Verification through System-Level Simulation . . . . . . . . . 78 6.3.2. Applicability on the System Level . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 6.3.3. Comparison of Admission Control Schemes . . . . . . . . . . 80 6.3.4. Impact of the Packet Loss Tolerance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 6.3.5. Impact of the Number of Agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 6.3.6. Age of Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 6.3.7. Channel Saturation Ratio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 6.3.8. Enforcing Full Channel Saturation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 6.4. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 7. Dual Hop – Single Agent 91 7.1. State-Aware Resource Allocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 7.2. Optimization Targets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 7.3. Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 7.3.1. Extensive Simulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 7.3.2. Non-Integer-Constrained Optimization . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 7.4. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 8. Conclusions and Outlook 105 8.1. Key Results and Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 8.2. Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 A. DC Motor Model 111 Bibliography 113 Publications of the Author 127 List of Figures 129 List of Tables 131 List of Operators and Constants 133 List of Symbols 135 List of Acronyms 137 Curriculum Vitae 139In industrial manufacturing, Industry 4.0 refers to the ongoing convergence of the real and virtual worlds, enabled through intelligently interconnecting industrial machines and processes through information and communications technology. Ultrareliable low-latency communication (URLLC) is widely regarded as the enabling technology for Industry 4.0 due to its ability to fulfill highest quality-of-service (QoS) comparable to those of industrial wireline connections. In contrast to this trend, a range of works in the research domain of networked control systems have shown that URLLC’s supreme QoS is not necessarily required to achieve high quality-ofcontrol; the co-design of control and communication enables to jointly optimize and balance both quality-of-control parameters and network parameters through blurring the boundary between application and network layer. However, through the tight interlacing, this approach requires a fundamental (joint) redesign of both control systems and communication networks and may therefore not lead to short-term widespread adoption. Therefore, this thesis instead embraces a novel co-design approach which keeps both domains distinct but leverages the combination of control and communications by yet exploiting the age of information (AoI) as a valuable interface metric. This thesis contributes to quantifying application dependability as a consequence of exceeding a given peak AoI with the particular focus on packet losses. The beneficial influence of negative temporal packet loss correlation on control performance is demonstrated by means of the automated guided vehicle use case. Assuming small-scale fading as the dominant cause of communication failure, a series of communication failures are mapped to an application failure through discrete-time Markov models for single-hop (e.g, only uplink or downlink) and dual-hop (e.g., subsequent uplink and downlink) architectures. This enables the derivation of application-related dependability metrics such as the mean time to failure in closed form. For single-hop networks, an AoI-aware resource allocation strategy termed state-aware resource allocation (SARA) is proposed that increases the application reliability by orders of magnitude compared to static multi-connectivity while keeping the resource consumption in the range of best-effort single-connectivity. This dependability can also be statistically guaranteed on a system level – where multiple agents compete for a limited number of resources – if the provided amount of resources per agent is increased by approximately 10 %. For the dual-hop scenario, an AoI-aware resource allocation optimization is developed that minimizes a user-defined penalty function that punishes low application reliability, high AoI, and high average resource consumption. This optimization may be carried out offline and each resulting optimal SARA scheme may be implemented as a look-up table in the lower medium access control layer of future wireless industrial networks.:1. Introduction 1 1.1. The Need for an Industrial Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.2. Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2. Related Work 7 2.1. Communications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 2.2. Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.3. Codesign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 2.3.1. The Need for Abstraction – Age of Information . . . . . . . . 11 2.4. Dependability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2.5. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 3. Deriving Proper Communications Requirements 17 3.1. Fundamentals of Control Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 3.1.1. Sampling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 3.1.2. Performance Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 3.1.3. Packet Losses and Delay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 3.2. Joint Design of Control Loop with Packet Losses . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 3.2.1. Method 1: Reduced Sampling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 3.2.2. Method 2: Markov Jump Linear System . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 3.2.3. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 3.3. Focus Application: The AGV Use Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 3.3.1. Control Loop Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 3.3.2. Control Performance Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 3.3.3. Joint Modeling: Applying Reduced Sampling . . . . . . . . . . 34 3.3.4. Joint Modeling: Applying MJLS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 3.4. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 4. Modeling Control-Communication Failures 43 4.1. Communication Assumptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 4.1.1. Small-Scale Fading as a Cause of Failure . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 4.1.2. Connectivity Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 4.2. Failure Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 4.2.1. Single-hop network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 4.2.2. Dual-hop network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 4.3. Performance Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 4.3.1. Mean Time to Failure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 4.3.2. Packet Loss Ratio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 4.3.3. Average Number of Assigned Channels . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 4.3.4. Age of Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 4.4. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 5. Single Hop – Single Agent 61 5.1. State-Aware Resource Allocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 5.2. Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 5.3. Erroneous Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 5.4. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 6. Single Hop – Multiple Agents 71 6.1. Failure Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 6.1.1. Admission Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 6.1.2. Transition Probabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 6.1.3. Computational Complexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 6.1.4. Performance Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 6.2. Illustration Scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 6.3. Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 6.3.1. Verification through System-Level Simulation . . . . . . . . . 78 6.3.2. Applicability on the System Level . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 6.3.3. Comparison of Admission Control Schemes . . . . . . . . . . 80 6.3.4. Impact of the Packet Loss Tolerance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 6.3.5. Impact of the Number of Agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 6.3.6. Age of Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 6.3.7. Channel Saturation Ratio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 6.3.8. Enforcing Full Channel Saturation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 6.4. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 7. Dual Hop – Single Agent 91 7.1. State-Aware Resource Allocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 7.2. Optimization Targets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 7.3. Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 7.3.1. Extensive Simulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 7.3.2. Non-Integer-Constrained Optimization . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 7.4. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 8. Conclusions and Outlook 105 8.1. Key Results and Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 8.2. Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 A. DC Motor Model 111 Bibliography 113 Publications of the Author 127 List of Figures 129 List of Tables 131 List of Operators and Constants 133 List of Symbols 135 List of Acronyms 137 Curriculum Vitae 13

Survivability modeling for cyber-physical systems subject to data corruption

Cyber-physical critical infrastructures are created when traditional physical infrastructure is supplemented with advanced monitoring, control, computing, and communication capability. More intelligent decision support and improved efficacy, dependability, and security are expected. Quantitative models and evaluation methods are required for determining the extent to which a cyber-physical infrastructure improves on its physical predecessors. It is essential that these models reflect both cyber and physical aspects of operation and failure. In this dissertation, we propose quantitative models for dependability attributes, in particular, survivability, of cyber-physical systems. Any malfunction or security breach, whether cyber or physical, that causes the system operation to depart from specifications will affect these dependability attributes. Our focus is on data corruption, which compromises decision support -- the fundamental role played by cyber infrastructure. The first research contribution of this work is a Petri net model for information exchange in cyber-physical systems, which facilitates i) evaluation of the extent of data corruption at a given time, and ii) illuminates the service degradation caused by propagation of corrupt data through the cyber infrastructure. In the second research contribution, we propose metrics and an evaluation method for survivability, which captures the extent of functionality retained by a system after a disruptive event. We illustrate the application of our methods through case studies on smart grids, intelligent water distribution networks, and intelligent transportation systems. Data, cyber infrastructure, and intelligent control are part and parcel of nearly every critical infrastructure that underpins daily life in developed countries. Our work provides means for quantifying and predicting the service degradation caused when cyber infrastructure fails to serve its intended purpose. It can also serve as the foundation for efforts to fortify critical systems and mitigate inevitable failures --Abstract, page iii

Digital-Twins towards Cyber-Physical Systems: A Brief Survey

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are integrations of computation and physical processes. Physical processes are monitored and controlled by embedded computers and networks, which frequently have feedback loops where physical processes affect computations and vice versa. To ease the analysis of a system, the costly physical plants can be replaced by the high-fidelity virtual models that provide a framework for Digital-Twins (DT). This paper aims to briefly review the state-of-the-art and recent developments in DT and CPS. Three main components in CPS, including communication, control, and computation, are reviewed. Besides, the main tools and methodologies required for implementing practical DT are discussed by following the main applications of DT in the fourth industrial revolution through aspects of smart manufacturing, sixth wireless generation (6G), health, production, energy, and so on. Finally, the main limitations and ideas for future remarks are talked about followed by a short guideline for real-world application of DT towards CPS