Modeling interactions in human-centric wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The recent growth of social networking and sensing applications has enabled people to perform crowd computing. In turn, this activity has opened several opportunities to address people's needs in various application areas, such as tourism, security, entertainment and emergency response. However, the design of these applications has also brought several challenges to software designers. Since users of these systems interact among them in heterogeneous physical scenarios, their interactions should be formally considered in the design of these applications in order to determine whether or not the services embedded in the system are suitable to support those interactions. The lack of guidelines to address this modeling issue not only jeopardizes the suitability of these applications, but also implies the services provided by the system can be evaluated only after implementation, which is clearly risky and expensive. This article proposes an initial modeling language that allows software designers to address this challenge through the representation of the interaction among users of a system. The interaction model represented using the proposed language allows designers to evaluate, at the design time, the information flow and the availability of interaction supporting services in the system. The usability and usefulness of the proposal are shown using a running example.

Modeling Computer-Mediated User Interactions in Ubiquitous Collaborative Systems

“…This paper has shown the limitations that modeling languages reported in the literature have to represent computer-mediated user interactions in ubiquitous collaborative systems. The most suitable proposals to represent these scenarios seems to be the MCM notation [14] and its extension to address IoT settings [9]. However, both notations were conceived to model collaborative processes in a particular application domain, therefore they are limited to model people-driven processes out of those domains.…”

“…The literature reports various visual notations to represent user interaction and also identify the collaboration supporting services that are potentially required to implement the behavior of these systems [8,9]. Although useful, these languages fall short in terms of their capability to represent the features and participants in a ubiquitous collaboration process.…”

“…Using a similar approach, the Mobile Collaboration Modeling (MCM) notation [8] considers the high-level workflows that structure the mobile collaboration processes, as an input to generate a graph of interactions among the roles involved in that process. In more recent work, Monares et al [9] extended the MCM notation to model interactions in human-centric wireless sensor networks. Although useful, the representation they generate are limited by the expressiveness of these notations.…”

“…CIMoN is aligned with the proposals represented in MCM and its variants [9,14]. Therefore, it considers the actors and the relationships among them, as the most important elements of the model.…”

OIoT: A Platform to Manage Opportunistic IoT Communities

“…Various recent works explore human factors of IoT systems [7], especially the interaction between online and offline social communities. A reference architecture for developing opportunistic IoT systems is proposed in [6].…”