Norm-based and Commitment-driven Agentification of the Internet of Things

There are no doubts that the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has conquered the ICT industry to the extent that many governments and organizations are already rolling out many anywhere,anytime online services that IoT sustains. However, like any emerging and disruptive technology, multiple obstacles are slowing down IoT practical adoption including the passive nature and privacy invasion of things. This paper examines how to empower things with necessary capabilities that would make them proactive and responsive. This means things can, for instance reach out to collaborative peers, (un)form dynamic communities when necessary, avoid malicious peers, and be “questioned” for their actions. To achieve such empowerment, this paper presents an approach for agentifying things using norms along with commitments that operationalize these norms. Both norms and commitments are specialized into social (i.e., application independent) and business (i.e., application dependent), respectively. Being proactive, things could violate commitments at run-time, which needs to be detected through monitoring. In this paper, thing agentification is illustrated with a case study about missing children and demonstrated with a testbed that uses di_erent IoT-related technologies such as Eclipse Mosquitto broker and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol. Some experiments conducted upon this testbed are also discussed

Weaving Cognition into the Internet-of-Things: Application to Water Leaks

Despite the growing interest in the Internet-of-Things, many organizations remain reluctant to integrating things into their business processes. Different reasons justify this reluctance including things’ limited capabilities to act upon the cyber-physical environment in which they operate. To address this specific limitation, this paper examines thing empowerment with cognitive capabilities that would make them for instance, selective of the forthcoming business processes in which they would participate. The selection is based on things’ restrictions like limitedness and goals to achieve like improved reputation. For demonstration and implementation purposes, water leaks are used as a case study. A BPEL-based business process driving the fixing of water leaks is implemented involving different cognitive-empowered things like moisture sensor

Towards a Quality-of-Thing based Approach for Assigning Things to Federations

In the context of an Internet-of-Things (IoT) ecosystem, this paper discusses 2 necessary stages for managing federations of things. The first stage defines things in terms of duties and non-functional properties that define the quality of these duties. And, the second stage uses these properties to assign appropriate things to future federations. Specialized into adhoc and planned, federations are expected to satisfy needs and requirements of real-life situations like traffic control that arise at run-time. A set of experiments using a mix of real and simulated datasets, demonstrate the technical doability of thing assignment to federations and are presented in the paper, as well

Everything as a resource: Foundations and illustration through Internet-of-things

International audienceThis paper presents Everything-as-a-Resource (*aaR) as a paradigm for designing collaborative applications on the Web. Abstracting these applications’ various physical and logical entities, resources are defined in a way that permits their discovery, composition, and participation in business scenarios. Compared to Everything-as-a-Service (*aaS), resources are categorized into computational, consumed, and produced, have trackable lifecycles as per their respective category, and are customized in order to consider the characteristics of future resource-based collaborative applications to develop. From a capacity perspective, a computational resource processes data, a produced resource abstracts data, and a consumed resource captures data. Along with their capacities, resources expose methods that other resources and/or applications’ stakeholders call. The proper call of methods is ensured through restrictions like limited and non-shareable. This paper exemplifies the *aaR paradigm with a case study that revolves around the use of Internet-of-Things (IoT) in the healthcare domain. The case study is implemented in a RESTful fashion along with some standard Web technologies and protocols. The evaluation of IoTR4HealthCare system is benchmarked against two existing systems using cost and latency criteri

In Situ Mutation for Active Things in the IoT Context

This paper discusses mutation as a new way for making things, in the context of Internet-of-Things (IoT), active instead of being passive as reported in the ICT literature. IoT is gaining momentum among ICT practitioners who see a lot of benefits in using things to support users have access to and control over their surroundings. However, things are still confined into the limited role of data suppliers. The approach proposed in this paper advocates for 2 types of mutation, active and passive, along with a set of policies that either back or deny mutation based on specific “stopovers” referred to as permission, prohibition, dispensation, and obligation. A testbed and a set of experiments demonstrating the technical feasibility of the mutation approach, are also presented in the paper. The testbed uses NodeMCU firmware and Lua script interpreter

Towards a Resource-aware Thing Composition Approach

This paper addresses the silo concern that undermines the participation of IoT-compliant things in composition scenarios. By analogy with composite Web services, each scenario is specified in terms of choreography and orchestration and at design-time and run-time. To define things’ execution behaviors during composition, a set of transactional properties known as pivot, retriable, and compensatable, are used allowing to decide when thing execution should be confirmed, rolledback, or stopped. Along with these properties, another set of availability properties known as limited, renewable, and nonshareable specify the resources that things consume at run-time. Not all resources are always available and hence, could impact the execution of thing composition scenarios. A case study related to Industry 4.0 is used to motivate thing composition

Complex Collaborative Physical Process Management: A Position on the Trinity of BPM, IoT and DA

Part 7: Collaborative Business ProcessesInternational audienceIn the modern economy, we see complex business processes with a physical character executed collaboratively by a set of autonomous business organizations. Examples are international container logistics, integrated supply and manufacturing networks, and collaborative healthcare chains - all of which handle physical objects. Over time, these processes have become more complex, more business-critical, more time-critical, and at the same time heavily mass-customized. This implies that the processes need to be managed more explicitly in an increasingly real-time fashion, with ample attention to individual process cases. To support this kind of processes, no single existing technology class suffices. Therefore, we propose to integrate technologies from the areas of business process management (BPM - to manage the processes), internet of things (IoT - to sense and actuate the physical objects) and distributed analytics (DA - to take the right decisions at the right place in real-time) into a trinity. We illustrate our position with an example from the domain of container logistics