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The design and analysis of multi-agent human cyber-physical systems in safety-critical or industry-critical domains calls for an adequate semantic foundation capable of exhaustively and rigorously describing all emergent effects in the joint dynamic behavior of the agents that are relevant to their safety and well-behavior. We present such a semantic foundation. This framework extends beyond previous approaches by extending the agent-local dynamic state beyond state components under direct control of the agent and belief about other agents (as previously suggested for understanding cooperative as well as rational behavior) to agent-local evidence and belief about the overall cooperative, competitive, or coopetitive game structure. We argue that this extension is necessary for rigorously analyzing systems of human cyber-physical systems because humans are known to employ cognitive replacement models of system dynamics that are both non-stationary and potentially incongruent. These replacement models induce visible and potentially harmful effects on their joint emergent behavior and the interaction with cyber-physical system components. 

As automation increases qualitatively and quantitatively in safety-critical human cyber-physical systems, it is becoming more and more challenging to increase the probability or ensure that human operators still perceive key artifacts and comprehend their roles in the system. In the companion paper, we proposed an abstract reference architecture capable of expressing all classes of system-level interactions in human cyber-physical systems. Here we demonstrate how this reference architecture supports the analysis of levels of communication between agents and helps to identify the potential for misunderstandings and misconceptions. We then develop a metamodel for safe human machine interaction. Therefore, we ask what type of information exchange must be supported on what level so that humans and systems can cooperate as a team, what is the criticality of exchanged information, what are timing requirements for such interactions, and how can we communicate highly critical information in a limited time frame in spite of the many sources of a distorted perception. We highlight shared stumbling blocks and illustrate shared design principles, which rest on established ontologies specific to particular application classes. In order to overcome the partial opacity of internal states of agents, we anticipate a key role of virtual twins of both human and technical cooperation partners for designing a suitable communication.