* Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS), Elsevier *
* Special Issue on “Advanced Situational Awareness and Resilience for Hyperconnected Industrial Scenarios” *

Link: hhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/318785/advanced-situational-awareness-and-resilience-for-hyperconnected-industrial-scenarios

New technological trends and their adaptation to different strategic sectors, especially those aimed at the industrial sector and their interconnected infrastructures, entail multiple types of risks, including those related to security, privacy, and safety. This makes situational awareness and related areas, such as advanced prediction and detection, a priority requirement when it comes to protecting the most critical resources relevant to the business model or between models. However, the effectiveness of situational awareness is only assured if defensive measures are accompanied with advanced preparedness, response, and recovery strategies, thus providing guarantees of resilience.

Significant research progresses, in line to situational awareness, have already shown the way to: (i) combat some of the mentioned problems, some of them against counterfeiting and advanced persistent threats, (ii) promote predictive maintenance and resilience, and (iii) implement Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), and Generative AI (GenAI) methods to address not only cyberattacks on critical infrastructures, but also to mitigate adversarial AI attacks. But, overall, all these advances are still insufficient considering the heterogenous, hyper-interconnected and complex nature of many today’s critical infrastructures. The assumption of the new industrial paradigms (Industry 4.0/5.0) and the multiple factors that come into play in the protection of critical systems, in which it is necessary to safeguard operational performance, proactivity and coordination according to the NIS2 directive, become undoubtedly relevant when it comes to managing critical situations.

All the above leads to the innate need to consider and apply cutting-edge technologies to promote trustworthy industrial security, where the inclusion of disruptive techniques, methods and technologies become relevant factors to address the expected level of situational awareness and resilience. Therefore, this Special Issue (SI) aims to bring together cutting-edge results that address the specific challenges of all these topics and their implication in specific industrial environments. The aim is to promote research and progress in line with new technologies, as well as to learn about the most recent issues and advances in this application area with special attention to novelty and originality within the subject matter.

In particular, the topics of interest for this Special Issues includes but not limited to:

- Governance, plans, and automated security controls
- Dynamic risk management and automatic feedback
- Adversarial offense, modeling, and demonstrations
- Advanced attack prediction for advanced awareness and proactivity
- AI-enhanced attack detection and stealthy movements
- Mitigation of adversarial AI attacks on industrial & critical infrastructures
- Smart threat interpretation and projection for attack traceability
- Advanced attack response, playbooks, and mitigation
- Green prediction, detection, and response approaches for lightweight situational awareness
- Advanced recovery and feedback to the situational awareness
- Cyber threat intelligence and coordination
- Sharing data and trust management
- Auditing and accountability for situational awareness
- Intelligent and accurate feedback to situational awareness
- Privacy and anonymization techniques for situational awareness
- Lightweight protection to the situational awareness and implied technologies
- Dynamic preparation and coordination through simulations
- Automated training for (re-)skilling and knowledge in situational awareness
- Industrial use cases with practical demonstrations for situational awareness and resilience: energy, health, transportation, manufacturing, etc.

Important Dates

- Submission deadline: September 1, 2025
- Initial notification: November 2, 2025
- Final accepted version: December 31, 2025

Manuscript Submission Instructions:

- +Info: https://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/318785/advanced-situational-awareness-and-resilience-for-hyperconnected-industrial-scenarios

Guest Editors:

- Cristina Alcaraz, University of Malaga, alcaraz@uma.es; contact person for further information
- Fabio Martinelli, Italian National Research Council (CNR), fabio.martinelli@iit.cnr.it
- Panagiotis Bountakas, Sphynx, p.bountakas@sphynx.ch