SS01: Data-Driven Fabrication and Control for Autonomous Robots
Organizers: Renjie Ma, Zhijian Hu, Hongyan Yang, Longqiu Li
Theme: The prevalence of data-intensified computation capabilities integrated with physical processes boosts the developments of design and fabrication of autonomous robots, which potentially interacted with operational environments, humans and other robots. Automatic design and fabrication are the key takeaway for autonomous intelligent robots to execute the user-defined tasks and adopt the complex dynamical uncertainties pushing forward the enormous applications to targeted therapy and deep space exploration. This special session focuses on (but are not limited to) data-driven smart structure designs, dielectric elastomer actuator analyses, safe control and monitoring for autonomous robots.

SS02: Representation Learning Theories, Methods, and Algorithms with Application to Health Management of Complex Equipment
Organizers: Wanke Yu, Shumei Zhang, Yang Zhao, Pengyu Song
Theme: With the rapid development of sensor technology, massive amount of process data has been collected and archived for reflecting the operation status of the complex equipment. By extracting process information from historical data, representation learning can be used to develop health management models for complex equipment without apriori information. In general, the health management includes supervision, optimization, and maintenance, which are of great significance to the efficiency and sustainability of the complex equipment. The special issue mainly focuses on the new representation learning theories/methods/algorithms. Besides, the applications of representation learning for addressing the key challenges in industrial scenarios are also welcomed.

SS03: Fault and Attack Detection for Interconnected Systems
Organizers: Yuchen Jiang, Kuan Li, Angelo Barboni
Theme: During the past decade, connectivity has been significantly improved thanks to the construction of information infrastructure, the vast implementation of IoT devices, and the great progress in digitalization. It enables industrial systems to be built with larger-scales in an interconnected manner, where information from all parts can still be timely collected. In the meantime, novel challenges have been introduced to the safe and secure monitoring of such interconnected systems. In such background, novel fault and cyberattack detection approaches, schemes, frameworks, and solutions are required to be applicable to interconnected systems. This Special Session welcomes original papers investigating in the areas of fault and attack detection for interconnected systems from research groups worldwide. This SS also provides a forum to discuss the vital issues, challenges and possible future trends which are closely related to safety measures against faults and attacks.

SS04: Cybersecurity of the Future DER-based Power Grid
Organizers: Zhenyong Zhang, Mengxiang Liu, Chensheng Liu
Theme: Over the forthcoming decades, electric customers will continue adopting intelligent energy devices, from smart lighting and thermostats to electric vehicles and rooftop solar photovoltaics. Taken together, these distributed energy resources (DERs) offer homes and businesses more choices and control of their local energy, which are closely coupled with the rapid digitalization of the power grid. This is simultaneously opening up the possibility of the involved devices and processes, which were never vulnerable to such threats in the past, being compromised and affected, with potentially catastrophic consequences. This session will cover the cybersecurity issues of the future DER-based power grid from vulnerability modelling frameworks and defence technologies to security testbeds.

SS05: Digital Twin for Industrial IoT
Organizers: Yan Zhang, Wen Sun, Cristina Alcaraz
Theme: Industrial IoT can revolutionize the industrial operation by interconnecting diverse sectors. The success of industrial IoT relies on the dynamic perception and intelligent decision-making, which is difficult to conceive due to the complex industrial environment and diverse industrial devices. Digital twin, as an emerging digitalization technology, enables a digital revolution of industrial automation with integration of industrial IoT. However, there are yet challenges like high-fidelity modularity of digital twins, interaction and networking among digital twins, scalable and resilient design of digital twin for industrial IoT. This session solicits high-quality work on recent advances in Digital Twins for Industrial IoT.

SS06: Data Oriented Prognostics and Health Management for Industrial Systems
Organizers: Liang Ma, Xiuli Wang, Yang Li
Theme: Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) is perceived as a body of knowledge enabling to improve the reliability, maintainability, safety, security, testability and lower system life cycle costs of industrial systems. The core of PHM is to monitor system state changes in real time, accurately diagnose various faults in the systems, predict the behavior of fault evolution, evaluate the impact of faults on system health, predict the moment when systems performance degrades to the point of malfunction, and form a maintenance decision plan. We are particularly keen to receive papers that ultilize sensing technologies, cloud-fog-edge computing and artificial intelligence, including machine learning, deep learning and transfer learning techniques to explore PHM problems of complex industrial systems. Both analytical and application-oriented research will be considered for inclusion in the special session.

SS07: Recent Advances on Networked Control Systems: Analysis and Synthesis
Organizers: Yong He, Lin Jiang,Xing-Chen Shangguan, Li Jin
Theme: There are many typical cyber-physical systems, such as smart grids, intelligent transportation, etc. Cyber-physical systems adopt communication networks to transmit measurement information and control signals, inevitably suffering from network-induced constraints, including time delays, sampling, packet loss, and cyber-attacks. These network-induced constraints degrade the dynamic performances of networked control systems and can even threaten their safe operation. Such networked control systems can be modeled as time-delay systems, sampled-data control systems, stochastic systems, etc. To ensure the networked control systems with preferable dynamic performances, it is essential to conduct the stability analysis while fully considering the network-induced constraints. Then, control strategies such as robust control, intelligent control, and intermittent control can be designed to eliminate the adverse effects of network-induced constraints. Therefore, this special session aims to provide a valuable platform for exchanging the recent advances in networked control systems.

SS08: Advanced Control in Aerospace Cyber-Physical and Autonomous Systems
Organizers: Kenan Yong, Xiaodong Shao, Zeyang Yin
Theme: Continuous rapid advances in intelligent automation and networking technologies are stimulating the development of aeronautical/astronautic applications and enhancing the performance of guidance, navigation, and control. The purpose of this special session is to provide an opportunity for scientists and practitioners to propose significant theoretical and applied developments in control theory that have highly impacted the engineering of Aerospace Cyber-Physical and Autonomous Systems such as ground rovers, unmanned aerial vehicles, formation flying systems, and autonomous spacecraft. The broad fields of control methodologies and applications in the specific systems are the major areas covered, together with connections to machine learning, information theory, game theory, and computing.

SS09: Resilience of Cyber-Physical Power Systems
Organizers: Zhengcheng Dong, Meng Tian, Chunyu Chen
Theme: The legacy grid is transforming into a cyber-physical system. With the ever-growing integration and interaction of cyber and physical systems, there is a great likelihood of risks propagating across these two systems and causing severe impact. In recent years, extreme disasters and various types of attacks against infrastructures frequently occur, exposing power systems to serious external threats. Therefore, there is an urgent need to study the resilience and vulnerability of cyber-physical power systems under various types of extreme events and to improve the system's ability to withstand risks. This session focuses on the resilience and vulnerability of cyber-physical power systems to various types of extreme events, including modelling, theories, methods, metrics and enhancement strategies.

SS10: Repetitive Control and its Recent Advance in Practice
Organizers: Keliang Zhou, Yongqiang Ye, Quan Quan, Bin Zhang
Theme: In practice, many control tasks are often of periodic nature. Industrial manipulators are usually required to track or reject periodic exogenous signals when performing operations such as picking, dropping, and painting. Besides, special applications include magnetic spacecraft attitude control, helicopter vibration active control and vertical landing on the oscillating platform, aircraft power harmonic elimination, satellite formation, LED light tracking, control of hydraulic servo mechanism, and lower limb exoskeleton control. For these periodic control tasks, repetitive control enables high-precision control performance. This special session therefore seek new technologies related to RC for improvements on robustness, transient response, and accuracy with new applications.

SS11: Application of Artificial Intelligence in Iron and Steel Metallurgy Process
Organizers: Jie Hu, Sheng Du, Xinmin Zhang, Luefeng Chen
Theme: Currently, complex iron and steel metallurgy process is moving toward intelligent manufacturing. The success of intelligent manufacturing depends on the timely acquisition, distribution and utilization of various types of data from machines, processes and products. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, how to apply these new technologies in the iron and steel metallurgy process has attracted a lot of scholars' attention. The main objective of this Special Session is to create a platform for scientists, engineers, and practitioners to present their latest advancements in the field of application of artificial intelligence in iron and steel metallurgy process.

SS12: Theories, Technologies and Applications of Intelligent and Connected Vehicles
Organizers: Zhiyang Ju, Jicheng Chen, Henglai Wei, Hui Zhang
Theme: Recently, Intelligent and Connected Vehicles (ICVs) have attracted increasing attention from both academia and industry due to their potential to improve driving safety and traffic efficiency. The research on ICVs includes a number of aspects such as decision-making and control of intelligent vehicles, safety and security of ICVs, and perception and fusion of driving environment. To enhance the development of ICVs, tremendous efforts are required to seek advanced solutions from fundamental theory, systematic framework and general point of view. This special session aims to provide a platform for researchers to present their recent research findings related to ICVs. The topics include but are not limited to decision and control, cybersecurity, sensor fusion, cooperation between vehicles, safe artificial intelligence for ICV safety, validation, and verification technologies.

SS13: Active Disturbance Rejection and Intelligent Control for Industrial Systems
Organizers: Youwu Du, Zixin Huang, Yin Xiang, Daisuke Chugo
Theme: Industrial systems usually suffer from unknown disturbances that degrade control performance. Disturbance rejection is one of the most important objectives in the design of a control system. On the other hand, with the development of artificial intelligence, neural networks, and other areas of research, intelligent control has become a promising method for industrial systems, which has a hierarchical information processing and decision-making ability. This special session aims at providing people with a platform to discuss current development and future prospects on disturbance rejection and intelligent control, and to discuss the state-of-the-art research topics and challenges research ideas in the related fields with a broad interest. Contributors are welcome to submit their papers to this special session including disturbance rejection, intelligent control, equivalent input disturbance-based control, robust control, system design, network-based control, etc.

SS14: Distributed Cooperative Control of Multi-agent Systems and Its Applications
Organizers: Xiaowei Jiang, Shiqi Zheng, Chao Zhai, Xiangyong Chen
Theme: With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, multi-agent system has been widely used in many fields, such as the collaborative control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, smart grid, etc. At present, with the increase of the complexity of the communication environment, constraint factors such as communication delay, random disturbance, channel restriction and denial of service attack will inevitably occur between agents. In order to ensure that the multi-agent system can achieve the control purposes of consensus, formation control and coverage control, it is necessary to design appropriate control protocols to achieve the control objectives, such as adaptive control, fuzzy control, event - triggered control and impulse control, etc. Therefore, this special session provides a valuable platform for the latest research results on cooperative control and application of multi-agent systems.

SS15: Edge Intelligence based Software and Service for Industrial Cyber Physical Systems
Organizers:Deze Zeng, Shibo He, Haisheng Tan
Theme: Edge computing was proposed as a complementary or even alternative infrastructure, to cloud computing. Edge computing provides various resources at the network and hence is with high advantage on the network latency, jitter and bandwidth. It is also highly recommended to apply edge computing to industries. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence technologies also have attracted wide attention in the industries. Edge computing is also a promising platform to host various artificial intelligence applications, realizing edge intelligence. This has significantly reshaped the software development and service provision paradigm. Therefore, to discuss related issues, this special session focuses on (but not limited to) applying edge intelligence to service development and service management for industrial cyber physical systems, such as software design, architecture design, service management, application administration.

SS16: Theories, technologies, and applications of complex industrial process control
Organizers: Kaihui Zhao, Zhenhong Liao, Gang Huang, Qifu Chen
Theme: Complex industrial processes widely appear in mining, oil refining, chemical and electromechanical and other fields with the characteristics of multivariable, strong coupling and nonlinearity, randomness, time delay, etc. Research and application of advanced process control theories and technologies are of great significance to improve efficiency and reduce the cost of the industrial production process. The purpose of this section is to draw attention from experts and scholars in the field of process control to the development requirements of complex industrial systems, actively explore new advanced control theories and technologies, exchange new achievements, inspire new ideas, constantly improve and develop control methods for complex industrial processes, and promote the development level of informatization and automation of modern industrial systems.