  The Internet of Things (IoT) is envisioned as a global network of connected
things enabling ubiquitous machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. With
estimations of billions of sensors and devices to be connected in the coming
years, the IoT has been advocated as having a great potential to impact the way
we live, but also how we work. However, the connectivity aspect in itself only
accounts for the underlying M2M infrastructure. In order to properly support
engineering IoT systems and applications, it is key to orchestrate
heterogeneous 'things' in a seamless, adaptive and dynamic manner, such that
the system can exhibit a goal-directed behaviour and take appropriate actions.
Yet, this form of interaction between things needs to take a user-centric
approach and by no means elude the users' requirements. To this end,
contextualisation is an important feature of the system, allowing it to infer
user activities and prompt the user with relevant information and interactions
even in the absence of intentional commands. In this work we propose a
role-based model for emergent configurations of connected systems as a means to
model, manage, and reason about IoT systems including the user's interaction
with them. We put a special focus on integrating the user perspective in order
to guide the emergent configurations such that systems goals are aligned with
the users' intentions. We discuss related scientific and technical challenges
and provide several uses cases outlining the concept of emergent
configurations.
