Tarek Abdelzaher. 2010. Interdisciplinary foundations for open cyber-physical systems. In Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Formal modeling and analysis of timed systems (FORMATS'10), Krishnendu Chatterjee and Thomas A. Henzinger (Eds.). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 1-1.
but I haven't read it. FORMATS'10 was in Austria, too far for me, but closer to you :)
Apparently, the mentioned publication is just a short summary of a talk and does not give a sufficient answer to my original question. The main issue is: Is there any change in the roles/tasks/functionalities of collective agents compared with those used in more 'conventional' applications.