Understanding and Engineering Cyber-Physical Collectives

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Background

Recent techno-scientific advances and trends like the Internet of Things (IoT), cyber-physical systems (CPSs), pervasive computing, and swarm robotics are fostering the deployment in various environments (e.g., bodies, homes, buildings, and cities) of more and more devices capable of computation, communication, and physical interaction. This leads to a vision of large-scale networks of devices and agents that collaborate and interact with one another as well as with their surrounding environments to reach common goals and provide novel kinds of services, applications, and solutions. We call these kinds of systems cyber-physical collectives (CPCs), to emphasize the significance of both the digital and physical/spatial dimensions, as well as their system-, global- or collective-level nature in relation to operation and goals. A special class of CPCs is given by those that involve components able to move—we call these mobile cyber-physical collectives (MCPCs). A MCPC can be defined as a collection of mobile cyber-physical elements sharing tasks or aiming at global goals or “social benefits”. Examples of MCPCs include swarms of robots, fleets of vehicles, crowds of wearable-augmented people, mobile wireless sensor and actuator networks (MWSANs) etc. The major engineering goal for these systems consists in promoting (i) collective intelligence (CI), (ii) and resource efficiency.

While opportunities of emerging CPCs arise, research is devoted to addressing theoretical and practical challenges inherent to distribution, coordination, control, and operational requirements. In CPCs, the collective nature adds more challenges related to collective decision making, emergent behavior, and scalability, which fosters decentralized architectures and solutions. Additionally, given the large number of components involved in CPCs, heterogeneity would be omnipresent and an element to be considered. This brings about different space and time scales with which we need to deal. System-level adaptation to environmental change is another prominent issue to be addressed and studied in fields like self-organizing systems (SOSs) and collective adaptive systems (CASs) engineering, where natural phenomena and processes (cf. ant colonies, force fields, cellular systems, chemical reactions) are often used as inspiration for devising novel methods and mechanisms. Moreover, nowadays, ICT infrastructures are getting more complex and intensely exploited, enabling multiple possibilities for communication and computation across the edge-fog-cloud continuum; this provides alternatives for deployment of cyber elements and hence different guarantees and non-functional outcomes for CPC operation. The combination or seamless integration of humans within CPC is also a fascinating research problem, addressed in fields like socio-technical systems and through concepts and metaphors like social machines and crowd computation.

To address these challenges, this Research Topic invites original, high-quality work presenting novel research on cyber-physical collectives. Featured articles should present novel strategies that address issues in different aspects of CPCs such as methods, architecture, design, validation, verification, and applications.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Digital twins for large-scale cyber-physical systems

• Bio-inspired distributed computing approaches

• Multi-disciplinary approaches to collective behaviour design

• Decentralised algorithms for collective decision-making

• Models and tools for heterogeneous socio-technical systems and/or social machines

• Architectures and patterns for CPC systems design

• Methodologies for CPC systems engineering

• Programming languages and non-conventional paradigms for collective systems

• Techniques for soft or hard real-time coordination of collective activity

• Multi-agent reinforcement learning

• Techniques for green collective computing and resource sustainability

• Organisational paradigms for multi-agent systems

• Privacy and security in cyber-physical ecosystems

• Formal methods for analysis and prediction of emergent collective behaviour

• Verification and validation approaches for cyber-physical CAS (collective adaptive systems)

• Soft computing approaches to collective systems

• Mobility computing approaches to cyber-physical systems

• Approaches to crowds of augmented people and smart devices

• Approaches to swarm robotics

• Approaches to CI (collective intelligence)

• Case studies and applications involving CPCs (e.g., in context like smart cities, manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, security, healthcare)

Keywords: collective systems, cyber-physical systems, digital twins, systems-of-systems, nature-inspired approaches, verification & validation, swarm robotics

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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