An Agent-Based Approach to Realize Emergent Configurations in the Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled physical objects and devices, often referred to as things, to connect and communicate. This has opened up for the development of novel types of services that improve the quality of our daily lives. The dynamicity and uncertainty of IoT environments, including the mobility of users and devices, make it hard to foresee at design time available things and services. Further, users should be able to achieve their goals seamlessly in arbitrary environments. To address these challenges, we exploit Artificial Intelligence (AI) to engineer smart IoT systems that can achieve user goals and cope with the dynamicity and uncertainty of their environments. More specifically, the main contribution of this paper is an approach that leverages the notion of Belief-Desire-Intention agents and Machine Learning (ML) techniques to realize Emergent Configurations (ECs) in the IoT. An EC is an IoT system composed of a dynamic set of things that connect and cooperate temporarily to achieve a user goal. The approach enables the distributed formation, enactment, adaptation of ECs, and conflict resolution among them. We present a conceptual model of the entities of the approach, its underlying processes, and the guidelines for using it. Moreover, we report about the simulations conducted to validate the feasibility of the approach and evaluate its scalability.

Smart and Adaptive Architecture for a Dedicated Internet of Things Network Comprised of Diverse Entities: A Proposal and Evaluation

“…The rapid evolution of such networks with the evolution in technology and uses has also been discussed in the literature [2,8]. The role of middleware or an agent-based architecture has also been advocated by other researchers and experts [11][12][13]. Therefore, in this paper, we report the proposed candidate architectures having distributed agent-based architecture and their evaluation.…”

“…Existing research artifacts have analyzed and presented the importance of middleware or an agent for control, management, and orchestration in such a diverse and evolving IoT network [11][12][13]. These agents can be federated and distributed.…”

ASSERT: A Blockchain-Based Architectural Approach for Engineering Secure Self-Adaptive IoT Systems

“…Most architectures are found to be centralized, and none meet the defined ASRs. The most relevant approach was proposed by [8]. The approach enables the distributed realization of autonomous goal-driven and self-adaptive systems by exploiting agents' technology and feedback loops.…”

“…However, the authors did not present the architecture of their approach and did not consider security as a primary concern. Therefore, the approach presented in [8] is refined to meet the ASRs presented in Section 4.1. Our approach supports goal-driven and self-adaptive IoT systems to cope with security threats after the systems have been dynamically formed.…”

“…Several approaches have been proposed to engineer goal-driven and self-adaptive IoT systems by exploiting different techniques and notions, including multi-agent systems [7,8], the web of things [9,10], feedback loops [6,8], service-oriented architectures [11,12], a microservices architecture [13], AI planning [6,14], model-driven engineering [15], and business processes [16]. However, the majority of the existing approaches focus mostly on the functional requirements and do not consider security as a main concern [17].…”