CPS 2014 - 4th Track on Capacity driven Processes and Services for Cyber Physical Society

Along with the stronger capability of computing devices and the cheaper and faster communication networks, computing will be embedded in all types of physical resources, and applications with big societal impact and economic benefit will be created in time and across space. The tight conjoining of, and coordination between, computational (or cyber) and physical resources for achieving this kind of applications are the objectives of cyber physical systems. Generally, cyber physical systems feature a tight integration between computation, communication, and control in their operation and interactions with the task environment in which they are deployed. The concept of capability, that is the semantics of an action or specific functionality, is therefore a cornerstone in modern cyber physical society especially those service or process aware. Dedicated techniques for capability management and engineering can be applied and reused in a large number of areas such as SOA, BPM, Cloud Computing and Internet of Things and will certainly boost several related research efforts in these areas.
While the cyber physical society describes the future environment of collaboration, nowadays, service oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) are coined to specify how the computational resources can coordinate and collaborate, and (wireless) sensor networks (SNs) provide means to sensing the physical resources and interconnecting physical and cyber resources. Leveraging existing techniques (SOA, BPM, and SNs etc) for achieving the vision of cyber physical society is promising. The core scientific problems include the scalability, heterogeneity, integration, security, and the dynamics of the underlying infrastructures. The data management, as well as the semantic interoperability, in the cyber physical society is also posing a great challenge. Many key techniques for service and process engineering involve capability-based engineering at first. However, despite the importance of this concept, it has not been treated as a first-class citizen and has always been hidden behind other encompassing concepts such as the notions of service and business process. Capability management and engineering techniques need to deal with several research problems that arise in different contexts. These problems include, among others, capability complexity, different levels of abstraction and granularity, and capability configurability and dynamicity. This track aims at shading the light on the importance of capability engineering as well as at bringing together researchers and practitioners working in capability engineering to achieve the vision of cyber physical society by means of current techniques.