With the advent of the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 concepts, cyber-physical systems in civil engineering experience an increasing impact on structural health monitoring (SHM)and control applications. Designing, optimizing, and documenting cyber-physical system on a formal basis require platform-independent and technology-independent metamodels. This study, with emphasis on communication in cyber-physical systems, presents a metamodel for describing cyber-physical systems. First, metamodeling concepts commonly used in computing in civil engineering are reviewed and possibilities and limitations of describing communication-related information are discussed. Next, communication-related properties and behavior of distributed cyber-physical systems applied for SHM and control are explained, and system components relevant to communication are specified. Then, the metamodel to formally describe cyber-physical systems is proposed and mapped into the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), an open international standard for building information modeling (BIM). Finally, the IFC-based approach is verified using software of the official IFC certification program, and it is validated by BIM-based example modeling of a prototype cyber-physical system, which is physically implemented in the laboratory. As a result, cyber-physical systems applied for SHM and control are described and the information is stored, documented, and exchanged on the formal basis of IFC, facilitating design, optimization, and documentation of cyber-physical systems.
