Designing Swarms of Cyber-Physical Syst...

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) find applications in a number of large-scale, safety-critical domains e.g. transportation, smart cities, etc. As a matter of fact, the increasing interactions amongst different CPS are starting to generate unpredictable behaviors and emerging properties, often leading to unforeseen and/or undesired results. Rather than being an unwanted byproduct, these interactions could, however, become an advantage if they were explicitly managed, and accounted, since the early design stages. The CPSwarm project, presented in this paper, aims at tackling these kinds of challenges by easing development and integration of complex herds of heterogeneous CPS. Thanks to CPSwarm, systems designed through a combination of existing and emerging tools, will collaborate on the basis of local policies and exhibit a collective behavior capable of solving complex, real-world, problems. Three real-world use cases will demonstrate the validity of foundational assumptions of the presented approach as well as the viability of the developed tools and methodologies.