The Engineering of Computer-Based Systems (ECBS) Community is in its 21st year and is concerned with formulating and advancing methods, techniques and tools for engineering CBS’. The community’s long-termheld belief was that Computer-Based Systems Engineering (CBSE) is a different discipline, that is, to effectively engineer today’s and tomorrow’s complex systems requires a multidisciplinary role with both the skillsets of a Systems Engineer and a Software Engineer and an joint evolution of both.
This long-term held belief that CBSE is a different discipline which has been vindicated by the recent main stream adoption of the Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) as a field (Fig. 1). We see the terms CBS and CPS as interchangeable, with CPS reflecting a more modern term and CBSE the original discipline. Both CBS and CPS are effectively seeking to establish Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering. This special issue represents a selection of extended work from the last few years of ECBS technical meetings.