Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are highly-interconnected ensembles of software processes, hardware devices, and humans seamlessly interacting in order to provide functionalities that are strongly related to the spatial, temporal, computational, and physical context they operate within. The Internet of Things is thus a paradigmatic example of a CPS, particularly focussing on everyday objects and uses. Engineering CPS demands for effective approaches facing critical issues such as unpredictability of users behaviour and operating environment, fast-paced information production, consumption, and elaboration rate, effective distribution and decentralisation of computations, resilience to programs and devices failure, adaptiveness to change in execution context and physical environment, decision making under uncertainty and/or partial information, etc.
Agent-oriented technologies such as Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) already proven to be effective when dealing with most of the aforementioned issues, thus further investigating their applicability in the context of IoT is worth the effort.
Advancing in the field of Agent-oriented CPS means enabling better technologies for IoT, healthcare, transportation, manufacturing, entertainment.