Towards Distributed and Context-Aware Human-Centric Cyber-Physical Systems

As the number of devices connected to the Internet increases, the interactions between the general population and Cyber-Physical Systems multiplies. Most of these interactions occur through people's smart devices. Thanks to the large number of sensor included on these devices and their capabilities to connect to other sensors they serve as a gateway to Cyber-Physical Systems. However, most of the capabilities of these devices are underutilized, since they are only used to upload the sensed information to centralized cloud servers. This paper presents the key challenges that must be faced to build distributed and context-aware human-centric Cyber-Physical Systems that take advantage of the capabilities of modern smart devices. In addition, the concept of Situational-Context is introduced as a possible solution addressing these challenges. Situational-Context is a new computational model that use smart devices to gather the virtual profiles of their owners. These profiles are combined and used to adapt and control the behaviour of Cyber-Physical Systems. This computational model could contribute to a new generation of distribute human-centric systems with a clear social orientation.