Dynamic IoT Choreographies

Abstract

The Internet of Things is growing at a dramatic rate and extending into various application domains. We have designed, implemented and evaluated a resilient and decentralized system to enable dynamic IoT choreographies. We applied it to maintaining the functionality of building automation systems, so that new devices can appear and vanish on-the-fly.Pervasive connectivity in machine to machine communication as well as advancements in sensor and actuator technology has given rise to the Internet of Things (IoT). For companies such as Siemens, the IoT concept plays a tremendous role for their ongoing evolution towards full digitalization. Smarter cities, eHealth systems, or Industry 4.0-enabled manufacturing plants are transforming into IoT environments. In this paper, we take an application from the building automation domain as an example to illustrate our solution. While building automation systems (BAS) have certain specific constraints and characteristics, the solutions presented in this paper are applicable to other IoT domains. In today's building infrastructures, we find heterogeneous devices such as lights, switches, window shutters, air conditioners, light sensors, or thermostats, which are being IoT-enabled. I.e., the communication with such components is based on Internet and Web technologies, such as the HTTP or CoAP, REST interfaces and data are exchanged via JSON. In the future, such IoT environments will become very dynamic. New devices will vanish and appear on-the-fly during their lifetime or change their properties.As an example, imagine a reconfigurable multi-purpose room that users can partition into multiple rooms by movable walls. When users move walls in the room, the installed equipment should automatically adapt to the new room configuration, which requires dynamic reconfiguration of the building system.The operation of such a dynamic room today requires the involvement of technicians at each reconfiguration stage, or provide a suboptimal user experience, with light switches not operating

A Service Discovery Solution for Edge Choreography-Based Distributed Embedded Systems

“…The work presented in [ 31 ] uses a choreography model to associate consumers with different providers. The approach is focused on dynamic configuration.…”

Networking-Aware IoT Application Development

“…In our previous work [6][7][8], we introduced the recipe concept to represent the design of an IoT application, i.e., a composition of services from IoT devices, separate from its implementation. A graphical tool allows the ability to define and instantiate the recipe.…”

“…Then, we enabled the distributed execution of instantiated recipes in [7]. Our approach went beyond the concepts of [33] by introducing mechanisms for fault tolerance and failure detection (see [8]) as needed by critical automation systems.…”

“…When this threshold is exceeded, an alarm message is sent to the emergency stop component to stop the machine. The type is used for matching offerings with ingredients based on the semantic type [8]. Offerings describe service or device instances, and how to access these services or devices.…”

“…This work describes the latest findings on our research agenda to enable IoT applications as distributed choreographies. Our agenda started with the definition of the Recipe concept as template for IoT applications [6], continued by our approach for runtime management of such recipes [7], the dynamic and resilient management of IoT applications [8], and rule-based configuration of networks underlying the IoT application [9]. This work combines the results of these previous works and goes beyond by investigating, implementing, and evaluating an approach that automatically translates application-specific SPDI and QoS constraints into executable patterns/rules as well as their actual monitoring and enforcement.…”