A Smart Platform for Large-Scale Cyber-Physical Systems

Recent advancements in the fields of embedded systems, communication technologies and computer science, have laid the foundations for new kinds of applications in which a plethora of physical devices are interconnected and immersed in an environment together with human beings. These so-called Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) issue a design challenge for new architecture in order to cope with problems such as the heterogeneity of devices, the intrinsically distributed nature of these systems, the lack of reliability in communications, etc. In this paper we introduce Rainbow, an architecture designed to address CPS issues. Rainbow hides heterogeneity by providing a Virtual Object (VO) concept, and addresses the distributed nature of CPS introducing a distributed multi-agent system on top of the physical part. Rainbow aims to get the computation close to the sources of information (i.e., the physical devices) and addresses the dynamic adaptivity requirements of CPS by using Swarm Intelligence algorithms.