Cyber–physical systems (CPSs) are evolving from individual systems to collectives of systems that collaborate to achieve highly complex goals, realizing a cyber–physical system of systems (CPSoSs) approach. They are heterogeneous systems comprising various autonomous CPSs, each with unique performance capabilities, priorities, and pursued goals. In practice, there are significant challenges in the applicability and usability of CPSoSs that need to be addressed. The decentralization of CPSoSs assigns tasks to individual CPSs within the system of systems. All CPSs should harmonically pursue system-based achievements and collaborate to make system-of-system-based decisions and implement the CPSoS functionality. The automotive domain is transitioning to the system of systems approach, aiming to provide a series of emergent functionalities like traffic management, collaborative car fleet management, or large-scale automotive adaptation to the physical environment, thus providing significant environmental benefits and achieving significant societal impact. Similarly, large infrastructure domains are evolving into global, highly integrated cyber–physical systems of systems, covering all parts of the value chain. This survey provides a comprehensive review of current best practices in connected cyber–physical systems and investigates a dual-layer architecture entailing perception and behavioral components. The presented perception layer entails object detection, cooperative scene analysis, cooperative localization and path planning, and human-centric perception. The behavioral layer focuses on human-in-the-loop (HITL)-centric decision making and control, where the output of the perception layer assists the human operator in making decisions while monitoring the operator’s state. Finally, an extended overview of digital twin (DT) paradigms is provided so as to simulate, realize, and optimize large-scale CPSoS ecosystems.
