Model-driven development of asynchronous message-driven architectures with AsyncAPI

Abstract

In the Internet-of-Things (IoT) vision, everyday objects evolve into cyber-physical systems. The massive use and deployment of these systems has given place to the Industry 4.0 or Industrial IoT (IIoT). Due to its scalability requirements, IIoT architectures are typically distributed and asynchronous. In this scenario, one of the most widely used paradigms is publish/subscribe, where messages are sent and received based on a set of categories or topics. However, these architectures face interoperability challenges. Consistency in message categories and structure is the key to avoid potential losses of information. Ensuring this consistency requires complex data processing logic both on the publisher and the subscriber sides. In this paper, we present our proposal relying on AsyncAPI to automate the design and implementation of these asynchronous architectures using model-driven techniques for the generation of (part of) message-driven infrastructures. Our proposal offers two different ways of designing the architectures: either graphically, by modeling and annotating the messages that are sent among the different IoT devices, or textually, by implementing an editor compliant with the AsyncAPI specification. We have evaluated our proposal by conducting a set of experiments with 25 subjects with different expertise and background. The experiments show that one-third of the subjects were able to design and implement a working architecture in less than an hour without previous knowledge of our proposal, and an additional one-third estimated that they would only need less than two hours in total.

Low-Code Engineering for the Internet of Things

“…The CHESS modeling tool was released under the Eclipse PolarSys project 8 and recently it was moved from the incubation status to the first major release. The CHESSML is an integrated modeling language profiled from OMG standard languages: UML, SysML, and MARTE under the Papyrus modeling environment 9 . Not all the features from all three languages were profiled to CHESS but only specific subsets that suit CHESS's perspective.…”

“…Soukaras et al [161] presented IoTSuite, a suite of tools for IoT applications development, for reducing development effort. The tool consists of the following components: i) an editor to support the application design phase by allowing stakeholders to specify high-level descriptions of the system under development; ii) an ANTLR 9 based compiler that parses the high-level specification and supports the application development phase by producing programming framework that reduces development effort in specifying the details of components of an IoT application; iii) a deployment module, which is supported by the mapper and linker modules; iv) a runtime system, which leverages existing middleware platforms and it is responsible for the distributed execution of the modeled IoT application. The current implementation of IoTSuite targets both Android and JavaSE-enabled devices and makes use of an MQTT-based middleware.…”

“…Through high-level abstractions, MDE can provide a unique means for representing many aspects of heterogeneous systems all in one place thanks to modeling languages, specifically Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs). Tackling such heterogeneity is essential to look at every system sub-component as a black box, where both the physical characteristics and the software that manages them are highly linked [9]. These sub-systems can be designed, developed, tested, and analyzed independently, and later they can be integrated to form a fully functioning system.…”

“…Additionally, the dynamic nature of IoT systems, where devices can join or leave the network at any time, poses another challenge for MDE tools. The models need to be adaptive to changes and allow for the efficient reconfiguration of the system [9]. Furthermore, deploying IoT systems can be challenging, as they often operate in highly distributed and complex environments.…”