Integration of different cyber-physical systems involves a development process that takes into account some solutions for intercommunicating and interoperating heterogeneous devices. Each device can be managed as a thing within the Internet-of-Things concept by using web technologies. In addition, a “thing” can be managed as an encapsulated component by applying component-based software engineering principles. Based on this context, we propose a solution for integrating heterogeneous systems using a specific component-based technology. Specifically, we focus on enabling the connection of different types of subsystems present in smart home solutions. This technology enables interoperability by applying a homogeneous component representation that provides communication features through web sockets, and by implementing gateways in proprietary network connections. Furthermore, our solution eases the extension of these systems by means of abstract representations of the architectures and devices that form part of them. The approach is validated through an example scenario with different subsystems of a smart home solution.

The Internet of Things mechanisms enable the management of home environments since they can be developed as IoT based information systems. From standard smart homes to automated buildings, including other kind of domotics and inmotics solutions, every system must be tested and validated before its installation. The current tools offered by IoT and home automation vendors lack in emulation features close to the real behavior of the devices. In many cases, delaying the verification actions until the hardware is acquired and installed may cause some drawbacks, for example, from the economic point of view. This paper presents a solution for emulating home automation environments which are based on the KNX standard and can be represented by architectures of devices. The emulation consist of developing virtual implementations of real devices which operate and communicate through web technology. The technology implementing these virtual devices allows us to develop components which can provide different type of data related to the installation (audio, video, text, animations, images, etc.). The architectures can be managed using web services and their behavior can be tested through web user interfaces showing the mentioned data. Furthermore, virtual and physical devices are connected to validate the interoperability between the real installation and the emulation

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) integrate computation and physical processes, often leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) devices. A key challenge is managing the complexity and resource constraints in these systems. The Web of Things (WoT) paradigm offers standardization through servients, but traditional implementations that embed communication servers for each protocol can increase resource demands, especially as the system scales. This paper proposes WoT-Core, an architectural blueprint for implementing lightweight WoT servients to mitigate these challenges. Our approach shifts implementation complexity from individual servients to external, centralized brokers. Servients act solely as clients connecting to intermediary brokers that manage protocol-specific communication. This model aims to reduce deployment complexity and servient processing load. We detail the architecture, the role of Thing Descriptions, the initialization process, and an inter-thing communication mechanism facilitated by a dedicated ’connector’ component. The feasibility and trade-offs of the architecture are evaluated through a smart home application scenario, including a quantitative analysis of resource consumption and response latency compared to a traditional approach as the number of devices increases. This work contributes a refined architectural pattern for building more scalable and maintainable WoT-based CPS, demonstrating a significant reduction in servient resource usage at the cost of increased communication latency, a trade-off beneficial for many large-scale, non-time-critical deployments.