Dynamic Social Structure of Things: A Contextual Approach in CPSS

The emergence of cyber-physical-social systems (CPSS) and context-aware technologies has helped boost a growing interest in building frameworks for adaptive smart services that hide heterogeneity in the infrastructure and support services by seamlessly integrating the cyber, physical, and social worlds. However, this entails an enormous amount of computational and networking contextual complexity. Here, the proposed smart services framework in CPSS (called Dynamic Social Structure of Things, or DSSoT) boosts sociality and narrows down the contextual complexity based on situational awareness. DSSoT monitors spatiotemporal situations and, depending on users' individual goals and other social aspects, induces and structures relevant social objects and smart services in a temporal network of interactions. An application using DSSoT, called Airport Dynamic Social, provides a proof of concept.