The advancement of the agricultural economic sector, which is a labour-intensive one, can benefit from robot-based systems, able to identify objects and perform complex processes in cooperation with human actors. From the technical, organizational, and job management viewpoint, cooperation in agriculture can also help facing challenges related to sustainability and climate change, and connected to aspects of the market such as global competition, labour shortages, and fluctuating costs of materials (e.g., fuel and fertilisers). Agricultural robots (agrobots) hold great promise in addressing the aforementioned challenges. Starting from ideas at the basis of our project at POLIMI on fruit farming, this paper presents a context study, and a knowledgebased approach to model smart agricultural environments, where farms use sensors and agrobots, and cooperate via Digital Twins towards the execution of complex tasks. We discuss how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can enhance the process of training humans and agrobots in cooperative tasks.

Businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, aiming to start up in Model-Based Design (MBD) face difficult choices from a wide range of methods, notations and tools before making the significant investments in planning, procurement and training necessary to deploy new approaches successfully. In the development of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) this is exacerbated by the diversity of formalisms covering computation, physical and human processes. In this paper, we propose the use of a cloud-enabled and open collaboration platform that allows businesses to offer models, tools and other assets, and permits others to access these on a pay-per-use basis as a means of lowering barriers to the adoption of MBD technology, and to promote experimentation in a sandbox environment.

Information and communication technology (ICT) has facilitated the introduction of mass customisation capabilities into the traditional Enterprise, especially in the domain of manufacturing. Currently individual end-customers are allowed to design and order a product that is uniquely tailored to their preferences. Servitization and product-based services have been gaining momentum to support the integration of products and services with customers. This has enabled companies to maintain a competitive advantage in contemporary markets. However, such capabilities demand more efficient processes, information systems to enable resources optimization, maximized collaborations along the value chains, and interoperable information flows. The FInES Research Roadmap 2025 identifies both Sensing Enterprise and Liquid Enterprise as two Qualities of Being that are strategic for any future enterprise. In fact, the enterprise needs to become self-aware not only in terms of their networked ecosystem but also in face of their inner subsystems and devices. This paper develops the concept of the liquid-sensing enterprise, exploring how modelling and model-driven development can support the transition and services implementation.

The industrial sector is being impacted by the Internet of Things due to the increasing availability of computing and communication capabilities in a wide range of devices and equipment deployed in the shop floor. This requires substantial architectural and functional improvements in order to actually manage and exploit the potential of such smart components. The EU FP7 IoT@Work project aims at addressing the issues of Plug&Work configuration and self-management features in automation systems. This paper focuses on presenting the architecture and the main features of the IoT@Work Event Notification Service (ENS) middleware that is used to support an event-driven communication paradigm among devices and services, both inside and outside the factory plant.

Management of large scale distributed collaborative projects requires unified and aligned working methods and practices. Project alignment is the process to ensure that all key stakeholders share a common understanding of the project mission, goals, objectives, tactics, work processes and plans, and have the required competences and skills to perform in the project. Grounding on the recent advancements in the areas of collaborative networks, project management and Internet technologies, we have identified needs and opportunities for further development in the area of collaborative project management. We are presenting a methodology, model and a set of tools, called Project Alignment Booster, for promoting collaborative project management, introducing the concept of collaborative project alignment.