Integration of human actors in IoT and CPS landscape

The Internet of Things (IoT) is envisioned to facilitate rich interactions among heterogeneous entities, ranging from simple sensing devices to complex robotic devices and from autonomous service agents to human actors. The complexity and multimodality of human actors require specific interfaces for their integration with IoT frameworks that provide suitable software architectures, data models, protocols, message types, and applications. This study focuses on the requirements and design approaches for integrating human actors in a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) within the application domain of Industry 4.0. After a systematic review and taxonomy of the related research literature, the design and implementation of a comprehensive human-integration framework is presented as part of a multi-agent IoT middleware called CHARIOT. Example applications that are developed to exploit the human integration capabilities of CHARIOT middleware are then presented, which extract data from human activities, enable multimodal interaction between humans and other IoT entities, and assist different human roles in a smart factory environment to satisfy the human-CPS integration requirements.