Cognitive Effectiveness of an Agent-Oriented Approach to Cyber-Physical Systems

Cognitive effectiveness is tied to the speed and ac-curacy with which a human processes a representation. Software engineering models are representations, and consequently, there are proposals for assessing the cognitive effectiveness of software modeling languages. Agent orientation is a prominent paradigm in software engineering, guiding the development of complex and highly distributed solutions. Employing agent orientation for modeling cyber-physical systems has gained strong support, addressing the modeling of distributed autonomous software and its associated hardware. However, engineering proposals for cyber-physical systems are still emerging, needing more specific modeling techniques for guiding their design, construction, and integration. This paper proposes a synthetic approach to using agent orientation for modeling cyber-physical systems, evaluating its cognitive-effectiveness dimensions in a cyber-physical context. The results show promise regarding notation's performance, understanding, and usefulness. However, a significant discrepancy in visual expressiveness is also a finding.