Enabling High-Level Application Development for the Internet of Things

Application development in the Internet of Things (IoT) is challenging because it involves dealing with a wide range of related issues such as lack of separation of concerns, and lack of high-level of abstractions to address both the large scale and heterogeneity. Moreover, stakeholders involved in the application development have to address issues that can be attributed to different life-cycles phases. when developing applications. First, the application logic has to be analyzed and then separated into a set of distributed tasks for an underlying network. Then, the tasks have to be implemented for the specific hardware. Apart from handling these issues, they have to deal with other aspects of life-cycle such as changes in application requirements and deployed devices. Several approaches have been proposed in the closely related fields of wireless sensor network, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and software engineering in general to address the above challenges. However, existing approaches only cover limited subsets of the above mentioned challenges when applied to the IoT. This paper proposes an integrated approach for addressing the above mentioned challenges. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) a development methodology that separates IoT application development into different concerns and provides a conceptual framework to develop an application, (2) a development framework that implements the development methodology to support actions of stakeholders. The development framework provides a set of modeling languages to specify each development concern and abstracts the scale and heterogeneity related complexity. It integrates code generation, task-mapping, and linking techniques to provide automation. Code generation supports the application development phase by producing a programming framework that allows stakeholders to focus on the application logic, while our mapping and linking techniques together support the deployment phase by producing device-specific code to result in a distributed system collaboratively hosted by individual devices. Our evaluation based on two realistic scenarios shows that the use of our approach improves the productivity of stakeholders involved in the application development

Modelling SIP Services using CRESS

CRESS (CHISEL Representation Employing Systematic Specification) is a notation and set of tools for graphical specification and analysis of services. It is applicable wherever a system consists of base functionality to which may be added selected services. The CRESS notation is introduced for root diagrams, service diagrams, and rules governing their behaviour. It is shown how CRESS can represent services in SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). For analysis, service diagrams can be automatically translated into LOTOS (Language Of Temporal Ordering Specification) or SDL (Specification and Description Language). For scripting, translation is into CPL (Call Processing Language) or CGI (Common Gateway Interface). The structure of the portable CRESS toolset is explained

A model checker for performance and dependability properties

Markov chains are widely used in the context of performance and reliability evaluation of systems of various nature. Model checking of such chains with respect to a given (branching) temporal logic formula has been proposed for both the discrete [8] and the continuous time setting [1], [3]. In this short paper, we describe the prototype model checker $E \vdash M C^2$ for discrete and continuous-time Markov chains, where properties are expressed in appropriate extensions of CTL.We illustrate the general benefits of this approach and discuss the structure of the tool

Improvements of Decision Support Systems for Public Administrations via a Mechanism of Co-creation of Value

This paper focuses on a possible improvement of knowledge-based decision support systems for human resource management within Public Administrations, using a co-creation of value's mechanism, according to the Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) paradigm. In particular, it applies ontology-driven data entry procedures to trigger the cooperation between the Public Administration itself and its employees. Advantages in such sense are evident: constraining the data entry process by means of the term definition ontology improves the quality of gathered data, thus reducing potential mismatching problems and allowing a suitable skill gap analysis among real and ideal workers competence profiles. The procedure foresees the following steps: analyzing organograms and job descriptions; modelling Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes (KSA) for job descriptions; transforming KSAs of job descriptions into a standard-based model with integrations of other characteristics; extracting information from Curricula Vitae according to the selected model; comparing profiles and roles played by the employees. The 'a priori' ontology-driven approach adequately supports the operations that involve both the Public Administration and employees, as for the data storage of job descriptions and curricula vitae. The comparison step is useful to understand if employees perform roles that are coherent with their own professional profiles. The proposed approach has been experimented on a small test case and the results show that its objective evaluation represents an improvement for a decision support system for the re-organization of Italian Public Administrations where, unfortunately often, people are engaged in activities that are not so close to their competences

Possibility of SystemC code generation from SDL specification

Technology of code generation for models of systems is described by means of DSL (Domain- Specific Language) languages, based on MDA (Model Driven Architecture) design, provides a basis for further simulation and testing. In particular, the use of SDL language for design of formal specification of communication systems has more than thirty years story. Due to rapidly increasing complexity of systems, recently a group of researchers from SUAI and NOKIA Research Center has proposed and successfully implemented method for SDL and SystemC languages co-modeling use. This method has some significant drawbacks, seriously complicating process of SystemC components integration with SDL models. This paper describes a solution, which consists of method of SystemC code generation firstly by parsing textual representation of SDL specification, then by generating AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) tree and finally by generating of SystemC code from this tree