Complex, Resilient and Smart Systems

“Cyber-Physical Systems” are co-engineered interacting entities made of physical and computational components. Among cyber-physical sytems, complex and “smart” systems increasingly provide the foundation of national critical infrastructures, form the basis of emerging and future services, and improve our quality of life in many areas. The concept of “smartness” has been often used as a marketing catchphrase. This chapter explains smartness as a serious indicator which can help to describe the machine intelligence level of different devices, systems or networks also weighted by usability indices. The study included in this chapter aims to describe the implementation of complex, resilient and smart system on the level of devices, systems and complex system networks. The research considers a smart device as a single agent, the system as a multi-agent system, and the network of complex systems has been envisaged as an ad hoc multi-agent system organised in a network. The physical incarnations of the latter could be, for example, the subsystems constituting a smart city. In order to determine the smartness of a certain system, the Machine Intelligence Quotient (MIQ), Usability Index (UI) and Usability Index of Machine (UIoM), Environmental Performance Index of Machine (EPIoM) indexes will be considered. The quality of human life is directly influenced by the intelligence of smart machines. Finally, smartness also play an essential in enabling the overall resilience of cyber-physical systems through paradigms like pro-active dependability and self-healing.