Grant PID2021-124124OB-I00 funded by the Spanish Government MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and the "ERDF A way of making Europe”.

Summary

Some Smart City models employ cyber-physical systems (CPS) solutions to improve people's quality of life in health, energy efficiency, mobility, and sustainability. In many cases, these solutions shape networks and architectures of cyber-physical components, which are interconnected and configured following Internet of Things (IoT) guidelines. Although the number of IoT standards has grown in the last years, most focus on the electronic or physical part of the device rather than the software. Some years ago, the W3C consortium created the Web of Things (WoT) working group to develop recommendations for the software part of cyber-physical components (things). But the design of cyber-physical component architectures is not an easy task for developers due to the lack of interoperability standards in both dimensions, IoT and WoT, that facilitate the tasks of interconnection (location, compatibility, security, accessibility, etc.), but especially of formal models for the definition of cyber-physical components, and their automatic discovery. These problems have been widely studied in component-based and model-driven software engineering literature and can be extended to the WoT domain. Although WoT has recently established recommendations to enable Thing Description and Discovery of Things (IoT devices), these are in an initial state and do not cover the interoperability needs mentioned above. Some interoperability aspects are considered collectively during the architecture definition, but others are considered individually when defining the cyber-physical component. This project will focus on the Edge side to study and describe a formal framework that provides the appropriate development tools to enable, firstly, the specification of cyber-physical components, extending the WoT recommendations to consider different levels in their definition, such as aspects of data quality, quality of service, security, and context information. Secondly, it will also be necessary to establish a discovery mechanism based on the one proposed by the WoT but extend and adapt it to support cyber-physical component definitions described with the specification model developed in this project and federation capabilities. Thirdly, Edge Computing strategies on the dataset associated with the cyber-physical component and the discovery service will be studied, such as new algorithms for stream query processing and recommendation systems that allow a pre-processing of the data on the device side, with data analytics and inference of additional helpful information that the device can provide towards a consumer, all this under reactive and proactive behavioural models. The project also aims to develop CPS scenarios to test the tools developed in different fields, such as health, digital home, or energy efficiency. Finally, a remote laboratory for real tests with CPS will be set up.