Deriving Architectural Pillars for Internet-Enabled Smart Systems: An Activity-Mediated Socio-Technical Architecture

The rapid evolution of Internet-enabled smart systems has accelerated the adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS), Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Human–Computer Interaction (HCI/AR–VR) across distributed digital ecosystems. Despite these advances, the architectural integration of sensing, information processing, and system-level reasoning remains fragmented, limiting system coherence and accountability. This study derives an architectural foundation through a systematic synthesis of smart system architectures. An activity-mediated socio-technical perspective is employed to analyze diverse paradigms—including IoT-centric frameworks, AI-driven infrastructures, digital twins, Big Data pipelines, and cyber–physical systems—as well as reference architectures such as RAMI 4.0, IIRA, and other representative smart system architectures. Here, activity-mediated denotes an architectural mediation mechanism that coordinates sensing, data-driven reasoning, and human–AI interaction. The synthesis reveals a lack of explicit mechanisms for vertical integration and alignment between bottom-up data flows and top-down goal propagation. In response, this study derives three architectural pillars that integrate interaction, governance, and smart technologies. Their operationalization reveals a structured transformation process in which activity-derived signals are translated into actionable intelligence and adaptive interventions, enabling feedback-driven behavior and cross-layer traceability.