Agents Meet the IoT: Toward Ecosystems of Networked Smart Objects

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a loosely coupled, decentralized, and dynamic system in which billions (even trillions) of everyday objects are endowed with intelligence (smartness) to increase their own capabilities and seamlessly communicate and cooperate despite their physical/functional heterogeneities, becoming active participants in business, logistics, information, and social processes. What the term IoT means, however, cannot easily be described by a simple definition, because there are at least two different visions referring to the same scenario but laying the emphasis, respectively, on the concept of "smart objects as building blocks" for the IoT [1] and on the issues of "anywhere, anytime, and anything connection" [2]. The meeting point of these different concepts, however, is outlining a unique shared scenario: a massive extreme-scale spread of devices easily identifiable, locatable, and addressable that, thanks to their ability to communicate, sense, actuate, and embed processing, provide highly pervasive cyberphysical services to humans and other machines.