Modeling Software Agent Awareness of Physical-Informatical Essence Duality

Physical-informatical essence duality (PIED) is the parallel existence of an entity as both the original, usually physical source, and its informatical representation, as held by each agent interacting with the entity. Software systems interacting with physical and real-world entities have to maintain internal representations of these entities in order to handle them appropriately. The importance of modeling the dual essence of these entities in software controlled systems is critical to the execution of software-integrated processes that affect physical real-world entities. The implications of PIED must therefore be recognized and accounted for. This paper introduces a PIED-aware conceptual modeling framework for software control agents acting in cyber-physical settings. We discuss the utilization of UML and OPM for this purpose and demonstrate the applicability of our OPM-based framework through the case of airport baggage handling processes. In particular, we show that PIED-aware modeling and design of system controls can significantly improve treatment of inherent anomalies such as the common lost baggage problem.