Over the past twenty years, numerous research outcomes have been published, related to the design and implementation of soft sensors. In modern industrial processes, various types of soft sensors are used, which play essential roles in process monitoring, control and optimization. Emerging new theories, advanced techniques and the information infrastructure have enabled the elevation of the performance of soft sensing. However, novel opportunities are accompanied by novel challenges. This work is motivated by these observations and aims to present a comprehensive review of the developments since the start of the millennium. While a few books and review articles are published on the related topics, more focus on the most up-to-the-date advancement is put in this work, from the perspective of systems and control.@en

The fourth industrial revolution is elevating the overall flexibility and controllability of the production processes, leading to better consistency in quality and improved feasibility of personalization. However, an evident downside is observed from the boosting system openness because the security and safety protocols are not ready for the potential impacts and threats. In this work, an in-depth analysis about the novel challenges is firstly presented. Then, the mechanism of false data injection attack on the industrial cyber-physical systems is studied. The target is to reveal the condition when the existing fault diagnosis systems fail to detect the false data injection attack on the distributed and networked systems. A theorem is proposed to support the discussions. It is elaborated that establishing interconnections between the subsystems will help prevent undetectable attacks, and thus improving the systems' safety.@en