In response to strong industry demand, the D3-CPS project aims to drastically rethink the way that distributed CPS applications are developed and managed. The overall objective of D3-CPS is to support software businesses in exploiting the potential of CPS. Our goal is to lower the boundary of CPS development by drastically reducing the effort required to develop and manage (i.e. coordinate, monitor, and reconfigure) distributed CPS applications. However, we do also want to guarantee that distributed CPS applications execute within safe boundaries of time (e.g. responsiveness) and quality (e.g. consistent and accurate operation).