Edge enabled development of Smart Cyber-Physical Environments

Smart Cyber-Physical Environments are augmented physical environments whose behaviours are enhanced through the use of ICT technologies. The goal is to offer new services and functionalities devoted to meet people's needs and preferences, and to better exploit existing services and infrastructures. The use of IoT technologies, paired with the edge computing, fosters the development of Smart Environment applications having the important features of reliability, scalability and extensibility. This paper proposes an approach for the design and the implementation of Smart Cyber Physical Environment applications having the aforementioned features. The approach relies on the use of isapiens which is an IoT platform enabling edge computing through the exploitation of the agent metaphor. Such platform provides effective abstractions which are able to hide heterogeneity of both the adopted hardware devices and communication protocols. The approach is validated through a case study involving the realization of a Smart Office prototype for profiling and monitoring daily working activities and performing actuations in the environment on the basis of the obtained information.