Responsive Decentralized Composition of Service Mashups for the Internet of Things

Applications envisioned for the Internet of Things (IoT) would generally have to fulfill their design goals by mashing up devices and digital services in a manner that is both flexible, such that they can adapt to dynamic environments, and responsive, such that they can react to sensor and user input in a timely fashion. Most existing approaches for the development of IoT applications rely on precompiled mashups that are highly responsive, but inflexible due to their static nature. At the other end of the spectrum, fully automatic composition of services results in IoT mashups that are highly flexible, but responsive only for small numbers of IoT services. This paper presents a middle ground approach: goal-driven software agents are equipped with precompiled mashups and cooperate with one another to compose their mashups at runtime in pursuit of their goals. Agents are interconnected via relations that enable them to discover and interact with one another in a flexible manner. To support our approach, we provide an open-source platform that facilitates application development. We used this platform to implement a realistic IoT application that achieves its design goal by mashing-up multiple heterogeneous devices at runtime. Evaluation results suggest that applications remain responsive when scaling to many devices and for relatively large mashup compositions.

[1]  Michael Wooldridge,et al.  Programming Multi-Agent Systems in AgentSpeak using Jason (Wiley Series in Agent Technology) , 2007 .

[2]  Jorge J. Gómez-Sanz,et al.  Programming Multi-Agent Systems , 2003, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[3]  Simon Mayer,et al.  Practical semantics for the Internet of Things: Physical states, device mashups, and open questions , 2015, 2015 5th International Conference on the Internet of Things (IOT).

[4]  Victor C. M. Leung,et al.  Developing IoT applications in the Fog: A Distributed Dataflow approach , 2015, 2015 5th International Conference on the Internet of Things (IOT).

[5]  Simon Duquennoy,et al.  Actinium: A RESTful runtime container for scriptable Internet of Things applications , 2012, 2012 3rd IEEE International Conference on the Internet of Things.

[6]  Zach Shelby,et al.  Constrained RESTful Environments (CoRE) Link Format , 2012, RFC.

[7]  Arkady B. Zaslavsky,et al.  Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey , 2013, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials.

[8]  Carsten Bormann,et al.  The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) , 2014, RFC.

[9]  Rik Van de Walle,et al.  Configuration of smart environments made simple: Combining visual modeling with semantic metadata and reasoning , 2014, 2014 International Conference on the Internet of Things (IOT).

[10]  Vlad Trifa,et al.  Towards physical mashups in the Web of Things , 2009, 2009 Sixth International Conference on Networked Sensing Systems (INSS).

[11]  Alessandro Ricci,et al.  Environment programming in multi-agent systems: an artifact-based perspective , 2011, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

[12]  Athanasios V. Vasilakos,et al.  Web services composition: A decade's overview , 2014, Inf. Sci..

[13]  Matthias Kovatsch,et al.  Californium: Scalable cloud services for the Internet of Things with CoAP , 2014, 2014 International Conference on the Internet of Things (IOT).

[14]  Michael Blackstock,et al.  IoT mashups with the WoTKit , 2012, 2012 3rd IEEE International Conference on the Internet of Things.

[15]  Malik Ghallab,et al.  Chapter 14 – Temporal Planning , 2004 .

[16]  Alexey Melnikov,et al.  The WebSocket Protocol , 2011, RFC.

[17]  Olivier Boissier,et al.  Multi-agent oriented programming with JaCaMo , 2013, Sci. Comput. Program..

[18]  Matthias Kovatsch,et al.  Scalable Web Technology for the Internet of Things , 2015 .

[19]  Nicolas Lhuillier,et al.  FOUNDATION FOR INTELLIGENT PHYSICAL AGENTS , 2003 .

[20]  Erik Wilde,et al.  A resource oriented architecture for the Web of Things , 2010, 2010 Internet of Things (IOT).

[21]  Ingrid Moerman,et al.  IETF Standardization in the Field of the Internet of Things (IoT): A Survey , 2013, J. Sens. Actuator Networks.

[22]  Erik Wilde,et al.  Putting Things to REST , 2007 .

[23]  Stephan Steglich,et al.  glue.things: a Mashup Platform for wiring the Internet of Things with the Internet of Services , 2014, WoT '14.

[24]  O. Boissier,et al.  Towards a Social and Ubiquitous Web: A Model for Socio-Technical Networks , 2015, 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT).

[25]  Paolo Traverso,et al.  Automated Planning: Theory & Practice , 2004 .

[26]  Simon Mayer,et al.  A computational space for the web of things , 2012, WOT '12.

[27]  Michael Weber,et al.  homeBLOX: introducing process-driven home automation , 2013, UbiComp.