Engineering Smart Cyber-Physical Systems

IoT paradigm has revolutionized our daily routine life, connecting a plethora of smart devices, sensors, frameworks, intelligent systems and humans, in order to provide innovative solutions to everyday problems. With the advent of emerging technologies, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) shown great potential in latest years in various application areas, such as healthcare, urban environments, agriculture, transportation, environment monitoring, home automation e.t.c. As they comprise of parts interacting with the physical environment and others having computing and communication capabilities, they constitute a prominent example of systems-of-systems, while the autonomous operation of their components should be ensured. Autonomous components should be smart enough to adjust in the environment they operate, while learning from their peers. The presentation targets at open issues in CPS engineering to promote their autonomy utilizing AI tools and methods and discusses ongoing projects on smart CPS in three different levels: 1) Smart aggregators to manage sensor and actuators and collaborate within each at the edge with no central control. The principles of developing a self-control management middleware for this purpose along with implementation results will be explored. 2) Service integration in a smart CPS environment ensuring the quality of complex services provided to users. A quality-aware event-based platform for the coordination of micro-services aiming at the development of CPS applications and the notion of event fabrication to manage missing events from sensors will be presented. 3) The integration of humans into smart CPS and their wiliness to become part of them. A multi-view design approach focusing on human concerns towards smart systems and the concept of human critically will be discussed. These efforts are presented in the context of specific case studies from prominent CPS domains, targeting smart building management, smart farm management and remote patient monitoring.