If the market size of the Internet of Things (IoT) is in the trillions of dollars, as has been claimed, the market size of CPS is hard to count because CPS covers national and even world-class applications ranging from small smart home networks to large industrial control systems and even intelligent transportation systems. More importantly, this coverage is not just about simply connecting things together, but about spawning a multitude of devices with computing, communication, control, collaboration and autonomy properties.
"The next generation of industry will be built on CPS, and as CPS technology develops and becomes more pervasive, physical devices that use computers and networks to achieve functionality extensions will be ubiquitous and will drive the upgrading and modernization of industrial products and technologies, dramatically improving the major automotive, aerospace, defense, industrial automation, health/medical devices, major infrastructure, and other major competitiveness of industrial sectors." He Jifeng said, "CPS will not only spawn new industries, but will even rearrange the existing industrial layout."
But CPS also poses challenges that IoT cannot match. Much of those challenges come from the differences between control and computing.
Usually, the field of control deals with problems through differential equations and continuous boundary conditions, whereas computation is based on discrete mathematics; control is sensitive to both time and space, whereas computation is concerned only with the realization of functions. In layman's terms, control people and computer people do not have the "*** same language". This difference will bring fundamental changes to computer science and applications.