Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber‐physical systems (CPS) technologies can be applied to many application domains. Examples include intelligent green house, intelligent transportation system, power distribution grid, smart home, smart building, and smart city. Among these application domains, some of them have been extensively studied, e.g., smart home and intelligent transportation systems. In the meantime, smart buildings and smart cities attract researchers and industries to investigate these two use scenarios. Well‐designed IoT/CPS can reduce energy consumption, enhance safety in buildings and cities, or can increase the comfortability in the building. In the last few years, the research communities and industrial partners started to study and investigate these two use scenarios to develop prototype or commercial services for these two scenarios. Although many works have been conducted on these two scenarios, many challenges remain open. In this study, the authors study the development and challenges in five topics. They are middleware, computation model, fault tolerance, quality of data, and virtual run‐time environment.

Failover for service-oriented distributed networks is a prerequisite to enabling Internet-of-Things (IoT) in the sense of deploy-once, run forever. Resource reconfiguration is required to achieve failover mechanisms upon replacement of devices or failure of services. It can be particularly challenging when services in applications have more than end-to-end transmissions between devices that are heterogeneous or versatile, for which duplications can be costly and redundant. Specifically, a device with a failed service shall be taken over by another service peer without users', including developers and installers, involvement. We develop the fault tolerance mechanism for IoT, which is distributed and takes into account the dynamics within IoT. Strip is introduced to store a list of duplicated services, and, each service peer maintains a consistent view of duplicated services in the strip. In combination with the heartbeat protocol, recovery from failure can be achieved by manipulating strips in a distributed manner. Experiments using Arduino Mega 2560 compatible devices show that our approach is capable of failover in small networks, whereas experiments in larger networks are underway. The results show that the faulures can be recovered within few seconds without administrator or developers in the loop.

This paper presents the architecture and implementation of an automatic medication dispenser for users who take medications without close professional supervision. By relieving the user from the error-prone tasks of interpreting medication directions and administrating medications accordingly, the device can improve the rigor in compliance and prevent serious medication errors. By taking advantage of scheduling flexibility provided by medication directions, the device makes the user's medication schedule easy to adhere and tolerant to tardiness whenever possible. The medication scheduler and dispenser controller do this work collaboratively in an action-oriented manner. An advantage of this design is that new functions can be added and existing ones removed or revised with little or no need to modify the dispenser control structure.