Study and evaluation of service-oriented approaches and techniques to manage and federate Cyber-Physical Systems

In recent years, the world in which we live has been deeply modified by the advent of the Internet of Things, filling the environment with devices able to interact through TCP/IP. These devices are commonly connected to sensors and actuators, enabling the remote management and monitoring of physical environments. This way, it is possible to manage the physical processes via software; the environments enhanced by IoTs are called Cyber-Physical Systems. Cyber-Physical Systems are able to produce huge volumes of data, used by applications running on a CPS as input for any applications' duties. CPSs features can be shared with other CPSs through cooperation, enabling complex workflows to manage the environments better than it would be possible without any such cooperation. Typical examples of cooperating CPSs are Smart Buildings and Smart Cities. The former are environments hosting one or more CPSs, supporting their residents, and the latter are aggregations of environments that host IoT devices to create an especially pervasive instance of a CPS (in some cases, multiple CPSs) that support citizens across their daily routines. At the same time, the devices composing a CPS are capable to provide some computational power, that is typically not used to the fullest, and that can be exploited to ``disseminate'' the computation across the environment, possibly placing most computation near where the request originates. This way, a double face benefit is achieved: on the one hand, service times get smaller, because this approach avoids, or minimizes, network latencies and, on the other hand, it optimizes both power consumption and network bandwidth overall. This dissertation aims to provides clues about the recent and ongoing investigations about cooperation among CPSs, with the overarching goal to exploit a number of established and emerging computing paradigms to enhance the services provided to citizens living in the environments under the coverage of such cooperating systems.