Continuous Collaboration: A Case Study on the Development of an Adaptive Cyber-physical System

The need to interact with complex environments that are often not well understood at design time makes the development of smart cyber-physical systems (sCPS) a challenging endeavor. We propose a set of practices and tools that support the design and implementation of sCPS using continuous collaboration -- a development lifecycle and architecture to continuously incorporate data gained from the operation of the sCPS into the system. Continuous collaboration attempts to harmonize three interlocking feedback cycles: refinement of the system design by the developers, autonomous evolution of agents in the sCPS, and feedback from the evolving system to the developers. To support the process we introduce tools and techniques that we have found helpful to realize continuous collaboration: The HADES/Hexameter platform, extended behavior trees and the teacher/student learning pattern.