Pervasive Systems are systems composed of a network of collaborative sensing, computational, and reasoning components that are highly embedded in and actively – yet unobtrusively – interact with the environment.
Embedding millions of networked smart sensing objects into an environment creates a digital skin which senses its immediate space. These massively distributed networks of smart objects communicate with one another and analyse and interpret the immense amount of low-level spatio-temporal information about the physical objects and environment to produce a representation of the overall environment.
Such distributed networks of smart objects cooperate to support an application as unobtrusively as possible (transparency), making efficient use of scarce resources independent of growth (scalability), in such a way that the system adapts to a dynamically changing environment (evolvability), and that operates and gives results that can be relied upon (trust). Mainly due to resource constraints, devices and connections are inherently unreliable, yet the system should be able to provide reliable services (quality).
Situated at the core of the Internet of Things, our research has high societal and economic impacts in various applications in the area of Smart Urban, Smart Life, and Smart Industry such as environmental monitoring, ecology, ambient assisted living, agriculture, transport and mobility, smart industry, supply chain management, health, sports, asset management, predictive maintenance, and smart cities. Our system-oriented research is inspired by real problems, which makes multi-disciplinary collaboration natural.
PS is part of EDGE - the Centre for Networked Systems and Intelligence. EDGE unites close to a hundred researchers from the University of Twente and partners across sectors, driving cutting-edge research in computing, communications, and sensing technologies. We bridge academia, industry, and government, facilitating knowledge exchange and collaboration.