Guest editors' introduction

The Cyber-Physical System (CPS) of Railways is an intelligent integration system of information acquisition, data fusion, state identification, knowledge inference, system optimization and control. CPS presents a higher combination and coordination between physical and computational elements. It intends to enable the railway system itself to sense, analyze, determine, control, collaborate and behave autonomously, which has become a mainstream research direction of railway system in next generation. The 3rd International Conference on Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies for Rail Transportation (EITRT2017) in Changsha, Hunan Province, China, October 20–22, 2017 brought together worldwide practitioners, leading researchers and postgraduates showcasing state of the art research, innovation and industry practice at all levels and in all process in the electrical engineering, information technologies and sciences, software engineering and knowledge engineering for rail transportation. 4 research papers and 1 research note included in this special issue are selected from 138 accepted papers at EITRT2017 on the basis of a peer review process. The papers included in this special issue of IJSEKE focus on the application of knowledge engineering techniques to software development and railway system analysis, and demonstrate the state-of-the-art of Railway CPS