High assurance on cyber-physical interactive systems

Cyber-Physical Systems, as distributed systems of computational elements interacting with the physical world, are highly complex systems. They can, in many instances, be considered safety critical interactive systems, as errors in interaction can have disastrous consequences (consider the case of autonomous vehicles or integrated clinical environments). High assurance is, then, an underlying requirement, also at their user interface. In this position paper we identify five challenges to be solved both in the short and in the long term, regarding the modelling of (1) distributed and (2) heterogeneous interactive systems, (3) the analysis and relation between the different abstraction layers of Cyber-Physical Systems, (4) the modelling of real time/hybrid systems, and (5) the modelling of the dynamic nature of such systems. Solutions for these challenges are not presented, but possible directions are discussed.This work was financed by National Funds through the Portuguese fundingagency, FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within project: UID/EEA/50014/201

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications