Integrated development and operations management framework for cyber-physical systems of systems under the paradigm of swarm intelligence

Recent years have seen the widespread diffusion of low-cost computational systems, triggering the transition towards even further decentralization towards the Edge of autonomic intelligence. While in the consumer domain this transformation is happening very fast, industrial applications are inevitably more conservative and require solid methodological and technological grounds to guarantee this transition is dependable.

The 1-SWARM project focuses on the design operations for CPSoS with a specific focus on the industrial sector of large-scale distribution and logistics. The project aims at achieving an industrially acceptable level of robustness of CPSoS whose operation emerges as “Swarm Intelligence”. 1-SWARM’s solution will span across different steps of the value chain, connecting intelligence through the digital domain to maximise its effectiveness and reliability. The objective is to provide a methodological and technological framework, modular and re-usable (“Swarm Intelligence DevOps Framework”), for the engineering of the three major aspects of CPSoS:

• i) The HW/SW runtime platform that sustains their operations;
• ii) The distributed and orchestrated Intelligence that guarantees their autonomic behavior;
• iii) The extension of their “existence” into the cyber-domain for a full life-cycle approach.

Key to the exploitability of 1-SWARM’s result is the demonstration of its potentialities for 4 different application scenarios, whose requirements come from cross-domain use-cases, and whose variability allows extensive validation of the project technologies: 1) Manufacturing CPSoS for food packaging; 2) Logistics CPSoS for reconfigurable material handling; 3) Fleets of intelligent AGVs in a complex dynamic environment; 4) Aerial drones flock for extensive monitoring of retails shops.

Strong of its open and standard-based approach, 1-SWARM will create an international collaborative framework for the CPSoS domain, supporting extensively relevant standardization activities.