Our society and economy rely more and more on integrated ICT systems. In the (recent) past, ICT supported primarily all sorts of services and administrative processes, however, at fast pace, ICT takes control of almost all physical processes in society and economy as well, think of our energy supply, logistics processes, transportation, etc. With the term cyber-physical systems (CPS) we denote exactly these systems, that feature a tight combination of, and coordination between, the system's computational and physical elements, and the system's environment. Cyber-physical systems can be found in areas such as aerospace, automotive, process industry, civil infrastructure, energy, healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, entertainment, and communications. It is crucial that these CPS always and provably work correctly, such that reliance can justifiably be placed on their services, hence the adjective 'dependable'. The design and the operational management of dependable CPS still comprise a key scientific challenge.

Research on dependable CPS focuses on the design and implementation of communicating computational elements (both hardware and software for sensing and actuation, communication and computation), taking into account the foreseen interaction with a physical environment, and driven by application constraints. The thus resulting integrated approach towards design and implementation, allows us to increase the overall CPS' adaptability, autonomy, efficiency, performance, functionality, reliability, and their security and safety.

Examples of CPS include communicating manufacturing systems/lines, systems to track and analyze emission, communicating sensor systems, systems to provide situational awareness (first responders, navy), systems to measure and control (air) traffic, or measure and control complex infrastructural systems, such as energy and water supply systems and large-scale networking systems or large-scale server farms. Some CPS exhibit inherent mobility; examples include mobile robots, wearable electronics, or mobility/transport solutions ('connected cars').

Current application fields (at the UT) include car-2-car communications, smart grids, radar systems, high-tech embedded systems (such as, healthcare and high-end printing), ISP's, energy-aware server farms, high-end communication infrastructures (internet of the future), critical infrastructure management and protection, and a large variety of IoT-style applications in monitoring, maintenance and surveillance.

Key cross-cutting systems properties addressed in all dCPS are related to performance, energy usage, size, cost price, maintenance, operations, dependability, security and safety. It depends very much on the application at hand, how trade-offs between these properties are made.