Holistic integration of enactive entities into cyber physical systems

Cyber physical systems (CPSs) are built of physical components that are integrated into the cyber (virtual) world of computing. Whereas there are many open questions and challenges, such as time modeling, interaction between cyber and physical components, our research focuses on how humans can be holistically integrated. Our vision is to link human intelligence with CPS in order to get a smart partner for daily human activities. This will bring new system characteristics enabling to cope with self-awareness, cognition and creativity as well as the co-evolution of human-machine-symbiosis. In this sense, we state that drawing borders between virtual and physical or between users and technical artifacts is misleading. In contrast to that, we aim to treat the system as a whole. To achieve this, the paper presents a generic coordination model based on third-order cybernetics. In particular, the holistic integration of humans and other living systems into CPSs is presented, which leads toward human-centered CPSs.