Techniques originating from the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) areas have extensively been applied to develop intelligent and pervasive systems such as assistive monitoring, feedback in telerehabilitation, energy management, and negotiation. Those application domains particularly include three major characteristics: intelligence, autonomy and real-time behavior. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are one of the major technological paradigms that are used to implement such systems. However, they mainly address the first two characteristics, but miss to comply with strict timing constraints. The timing compliance is crucial for safety-critical applications operating in domains such as healthcare and automotive. The main reasons for this lack of real-time satisfiability in MAS originate from current theories, standards, and technological implementations. In particular, internal agent schedulers, communication middlewares, and negotiation protocols have been identified as co-factors inhibiting the real-time compliance. This paper provides an analysis of such MAS components and pave the road for achieving the MAS compliance with strict timing constraints, thus fostering reliability and predictability.

Reference models are an important aid for business process modeling and design. Their aim is to capture domain knowledge and assist in the design of enterprise-specific business processes. The application of reference models for process design requires guidance in reusing these models and flexibility in adapting them to specific enterprises. One popular modeling language for specifying reference models is event-driven process chain (EPC), which has been extended to express configurable reference models, i.e., configurable EPC (C-EPC). These models provide explicit reuse guidance but allow a limited level of flexibility following a reuse by configuration approach. To increase the level of adaptability of reference models, in this paper, we propose to utilize the application-based domain modeling (ADOM) approach to specify and apply reference models by using EPC. ADOM supports the enforcement of reference model constraints while allowing high levels of flexibility, adaptability, and variability in the business processes of particular enterprises. This paper presents the syntax and semantics of the proposed approach, called ADOM-EPC, and its specialization and configuration capabilities. ADOM-EPC is evaluated by comparing it to C-EPC, a leading approach for reference modeling and reuse, in terms of expressiveness and comprehensibility. Although the expressiveness of ADOM-EPC, i.e., its set of specified reuse operations, exceeds that of C-EPC, the understandability of the two types of reference models is similar.