Smart systems: A review of theory, applications, and recent advances

Rapid technological advancements have permeated numerous professional fields, transforming mundane tasks and complex operations alike, with examples evident in smart cities, healthcare, and various industries. As a result, a significant surge in the literature concerning smart systems is observed, as is the rise of pragmatic implementations of such systems. In this comprehensive survey paper, we decompose the cumulative smart system architecture into five fundamental components, namely: control, perception, knowledge, communication, and security. Inspired by the underlying notions of cognitive dynamics theory, each component is discussed in detail and categorized, thoroughly detailing necessary concepts and functionality. To add, we discuss the state of the art with respect to each of these components and the most impactful applications of smart systems. From this, gaps in smart systems literature can be identified, where future work is proposed to rectify shortcomings in published methods. This work therefore has foremost utility to those investigating smart systems from an academic standpoint, with the goal of examining the smart system taxonomy and the most modern methods. In addition to further defining the smart system framework, our analysis concluded that the most increasingly researched, and most important components in advancing smart systems applications are knowledge and security. Primarily, this is motivated by aspirations towards safe, adaptive, and robust data-driven autonomy in large scale systems. We conclude that blockchain, IoT, and machine learning protocols and technologies are continuously developing topics that will be essential in smart system advancement.