The talk will focus on cyber physical systems (CPS), especially smart factories addressed by industry 4.0]. A CPS is built of physical components which are integrated into the cyber (virtual) world of computing. Such systems offer many open questions and challenges, such as time modelling, big data mining, system awareness, coordinating activities and managing collaboration within and with external systems. Many of the published work focusses on the way virtual and physical systems can be designed, coordinated and managed. We argue that drawing a border line between virtual and physical is misleading the design of CPS. Rather we propose to use a holistic model and illustrate it on the concrete example of a smart factory.
We intent to show how a CPS model can be improved by the holistic approach of a generic coordination model we have previously proposed and the integration of enactive entities, like humans or other bio-systems. This integration could enable the system to become a smart partner for daily human activities. Our goal is not to create human-like systems, but rather a holistic integration of enactive entities into CPS. Closely connected to this integration is also the understanding and modelling of cognitive coordination. Our vision is to go one step beyond smart factories to "cognitive manufacturing”.