I Think Therefore You Are

Cyber-physical systems operate in our real world, constantly interacting with the environment and collaborating with other systems. The increasing number of devices will make it infeasible to control each one individually. It will also be infeasible to prepare each of them for every imaginable rapidly unfolding situation. Therefore, we must increase the autonomy of future Cyber-physical Systems. Making these systems self-aware allows them to reason about their own capabilities and their immediate environment. In this article, we extend the idea of the self-awareness of individual systems toward networked self-awareness. This gives systems the ability to reason about how they are being affected by the actions and interactions of others within their perceived environment, as well as in the extended environment that is beyond their direct perception. We propose that different levels of networked self-awareness can develop over time in systems as they do in humans. Furthermore, we propose that this could have the same benefits for networks of systems that it has had for communities of humans, increasing performance and adaptability.