Collaborative Systems for Smart Environments: Trends and Challenges

Collaborative systems will form the warp for smart networked environments wherein humans, organizations, intelligent agents, and devices collaborate. The smart environments of near future will be context sensitive systems within which the physical world is richly and transparently interwoven with sensors, actuators, and computational elements that seamlessly embed everyday objects and interconnect them through networks. Modeling, design, and development of collaborative systems in this context will support a large number of emerging applications including security, care and assistance, transportation, construction, sustainability and energy management, education, government, and manufacturing. In this context, a brief survey of trends and challenges is presented.