The Internet of Things is growing at a dramatic rate and extending into various application domains. We have designed, implemented and evaluated a resilient and decentralized system to enable dynamic IoT choreographies. We applied it to maintaining the functionality of building automation systems, so that new devices can appear and vanish on-the-fly.Pervasive connectivity in machine to machine communication as well as advancements in sensor and actuator technology has given rise to the Internet of Things (IoT). For companies such as Siemens, the IoT concept plays a tremendous role for their ongoing evolution towards full digitalization. Smarter cities, eHealth systems, or Industry 4.0-enabled manufacturing plants are transforming into IoT environments. In this paper, we take an application from the building automation domain as an example to illustrate our solution. While building automation systems (BAS) have certain specific constraints and characteristics, the solutions presented in this paper are applicable to other IoT domains. In today's building infrastructures, we find heterogeneous devices such as lights, switches, window shutters, air conditioners, light sensors, or thermostats, which are being IoT-enabled. I.e., the communication with such components is based on Internet and Web technologies, such as the HTTP or CoAP, REST interfaces and data are exchanged via JSON. In the future, such IoT environments will become very dynamic. New devices will vanish and appear on-the-fly during their lifetime or change their properties.As an example, imagine a reconfigurable multi-purpose room that users can partition into multiple rooms by movable walls. When users move walls in the room, the installed equipment should automatically adapt to the new room configuration, which requires dynamic reconfiguration of the building system.The operation of such a dynamic room today requires the involvement of technicians at each reconfiguration stage, or provide a suboptimal user experience, with light switches not operating
IoT systems are growing larger and larger and are becoming suitable for basic automation tasks. One of the features IoT automation systems can provide is dealing with a dynamic system -Devices leaving and joining the system during operation. Additionally, IoT automation systems operate in a decentralized manner. Current commercial automation systems have difficulty providing these features. Integrating new devices into an automation system takes manual intervention. Additionally, automation systems also require central entities to orchestrate the operation of participants. With smarter sensors and actors, we can move control operations into software deployed on a decentralized network of devices, and provide support for dynamic systems. In this paper, we present a framework for automation systems that demonstrates these two properties (distributed and dynamic). We represent applications as semantically described data flows that are run decentrally on participating devices, and connected at runtime via rules. This allows integrating new devices into applications without manual interaction and removes central controllers from the equation. This approach provides similar features to current automation systems (central engineering, multiple instantiation of applications), but enables distributed and dynamic operation. We also quantitatively evaluate the performance of our chosen approach.
Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) is pervasive and characterized by the rapid growth of IoT platforms across different application domains, enabling a variety of business models and revenue streams. This opens new opportunities for companies to extend their collaborative networks and develop innovative cross-platform and cross-domain applications. However, the heterogeneity of today’s platforms is a major roadblock for mass creation of IoT platform ecosystems, pointing at the current absence of technology enablers for an easy and innovative composition of tools/services from the existing platforms. In this paper, we present the Data Spine, a federated platform enabler that bridges IoT interoperability gaps and enables the creation of an ecosystem of heterogeneous IoT platforms in the manufacturing domain. The Data Spine allows the ecosystem to be extensible to meet the need for incorporating new tools/services and platforms. We present a reference implementation of the Data Spine and a quantitative evaluation to demonstrate adequate performance of the system. The evaluation suggests that the Data Spine provides a multitude of advantages (single sign-on, provision of a low-code development environment to support interoperability and an easy and intuitive creation of cross-platform applications, etc.) over the traditional approach of users joining multiple platforms separately.
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