Agile Service Engineering in the Industrial Internet of Things

Abstract

The emerging Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will not only leverage new and potentially disruptive business models but will also change the way software applications will be analyzed and designed. Agility is a need in a systematic service engineering as well as a co-design of requirements and architectural artefacts. Functional and non-functional requirements of IT users (in smart manufacturing mostly from the disciplines of mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) need to be mapped to the capabilities and interaction patterns of emerging IIoT service platforms, not to forget the corresponding information models. The capabilities of such platforms are usually described, structured, and formalized by software architects and software engineers. However, their technical descriptions are far away from the thinking and the thematic terms of end-users. This complicates the transition from requirements analysis to system design, and hence the re-use of existing and the design of future platform capabilities. Current software engineering methodologies do not systematically cover these interlinked and two-sided aspects. The article describes in a comprehensive manner how to close this gap with the help of a service-oriented analysis and design methodology entitled SERVUS (also mentioned in ISO 19119 Annex D) and a corresponding Web-based Platform Engineering Information System (PEIS).

How do Startups Develop Internet-of-Things Systems - A Multiple Exploratory Case Study

“…Usländer et al described some Agile modeling best practices in his work, including active stakeholder participation, document continuously, iteration modelling and test-driven development [9]. We did not see that startups have utilized these practices in a systematic way.…”

“…As the key phenomenon in this paper, we refer to the product development as the process of bringing a product to market, from ideation, conceptualization, requirement elicitation, design to implementation and deployment. [9]. From the theoretical perspective, these studies often propose methods without empirical validation.…”

“…A majority of tools and engineering methods for hardware-related systems are vendor-specific and designed to support closed-control environment [9]. Hardware components needed to be designed according to strict requirements of physical characteristics and domain-specific regulations.…”

“…Such commonalities are then used to identify the key engineering components around which the process of designing and developing Internet-of-Things systems and applications could revolve. As far as we know, only a few existing works investigated the methodological aspect of Internet-of-Things applications [7,8,9,10]. Furthermore, we focused on the startup context.…”

Easy and Secure Handling of Sensors and Actuators as Cloud-Based Service

“…The integration of management and production levels within industry means facilitating the exchange of information between the two. According to the current tendency to integrate the management information into the content management systems (CMS), cloud technologies have a very important role to play [9]. These technologies can be managed by the company itself or provided by third partly entities (IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service) that guarantee information security and privacy.…”