Low Cost IoT Software Development - Ingredient Transformation and Interconnection

Sensing/actuating ingredients are software running on smart devices which are widely deployed in physical spaces and integrated into our daily life. An Internet of Things (IoT) application can be composed of multiple sets of sensing/actuating ingredients and each ingredient can satisfy specific requirement of users by processing specific physical data collected from physical world or committing an action. However, users´ requirements for functionalities of ingredients and overall goals of IoT applications are diverse and may change. The application diversity leads to a rise in complexity as well as the cost of developing and maintaining the system software of an IoT application. In this work, we aim to reduce the design complexity and development cost of IoT application software. To achieve this goal, we use the software architecture PMDA which was proposed in our previous work. Here, we present a component-based formal methodology, namely FMDA, to transform the components of PMDA into sets of software modules as sensing/actuating functionality required. At the same time, we propose a connection mechanism, namely FM-CA, which can match and establish the interconnection between any two sensing/actuating ingredients as required. The behavior of FMDA and FMCA have been investigated. The evaluation results show that FMCA is more effective in reducing the cost if the requirements changing frequently or the failure probability of matching the required sensing/actuating ingredients is small.