A Knowledge Driven Policy Framework for Internet of Things

With the proliferation of technology, connected and interconnected devices (henceforth referred to as IoT) are fast becoming a viable option to automate the day-to-day interactions of users with their environment—be it manufacturing or home-care automation. However, with the explosion of IoT deployments we have observed in recent years, manually governing the interactions between humans-to-devices—and especially devices-to- devices—is an impractical task, if not an impossible task. This is because devices have their own obligations and prohibitions in context, and humans are not equip to maintain a bird’s-eye-view of the interaction space. Motivated by this observation, in this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework that (a) automatically dis- covers devices, and their associated services and capabilities w.r.t. an ontology; (b) supports representation of high-level—and expressive—user policies to govern the devices and services in the environment; (c) pro- vides efficient procedures to refine and reason about policies to automate the management of interactions; and (d) delegates similar capable devices to fulfill the interactions, when conflicts occur. We then present our initial work in instrumenting the framework and discuss its details.