PsCPS: A Distributed Platform for Cloud and Fog Integrated Smart Cyber-Physical Systems

Smart cyber-physical systems (sCPS) extend the traditional CPS by introducing intelligent and autonomous capabilities to these systems. sCPS provide smart interactions, smart controls, and smart enhancements for the physical world. These smart features can enhance the operations, efficiency, safety, utilization, reliability, quality, and cost-effectiveness of the physical world. These systems are usually highly distributed, real-time, deal with huge data sets, implement intelligent algorithms, and need powerful computation power and large-scale storage capacity. Some of the promising approaches to achieve the sCPS objectives include the use of a combination of cloud computing and fog computing to enable developing and operating them. Cloud computing can provide scalable and powerful computation platforms, large storage capacities, and advanced and intelligent software services, while fog computing can provide more optimized real-time controls for sCPS. Although cloud and fog computing can provide many advantages for sCPS, developing and integrating all these systems is challenging. This is due to the strict requirements of sCPS on one hand and the types of distributed and heterogeneous environments these systems support on the other. This paper proposes a distributed platform for cloud and fog integrated sCPS, named PsCPS. This platform can be distributed among multiple clouds, multiple fog nodes, and sCPS subsystems to provide services to relax many challenges of such integration. The proposed platform includes system and application agents that can be deployed on participating nodes to provide different services for cloud and fog integrated sCPS. These agents can be developed, implemented, controlled, and managed as a set of single agents, as multi-agent systems, or as hierarchical multi-agent systems. A prototype of the proposed platform is implemented and evaluated as well.