Enhanced IoT Composition Architecture based on DIY Business Process Modeling Approach

Abstract

Tremendous leaps in technological advancements have been taken recently and specifically the advancements in the sensing and communication technologies keep on adding new dimensions to the field of information and communication technologies. These drastic advancements led to vision of a new hyper-connectivity based technological paradigm called as the Internet of Things (IoT). Internet of Things has been the focus of research and development in the recent years and although, the goal of complete realization of the IoT vision is still to be achieved, it is already playing a major role in transforming our social, commercial and personal spheres. The increased attention from academia and industry has resulted in various approaches for the realization of the IoT vision that every physical entity should be a part of global network of things. For a global adaptation and realization of the IoT vision, one approach is to utilize general population towards the adaptation of IoT vision and for the development of IoT resources and applications. The approach is suggested to be achieved via the representation of real world entities as virtualized entities in the cyber world where the behavior of the virtual objects is exposed as services and it can be accessed and manipulated like real world objects. The Maker movement and the growing number of MakerSpaces all around the world is a testament to the utilization of this approach. The problem with this approach is that most part of the general population lacks the necessary programming skills to utilize the services of these connected objects to create their own applications. Do-It-Yourself (DIY) paradigm of development is one of the most popular candidate solutions for the general public programming skills problem. State of the art studies have suggested DIY interfaces for their IoT implementations. It has been identified that most of these implementations are application/domain specific or too complex for a non-technical user to deploy in order to utilize them for the customization/development of IoT applications and services. To bridge this gap between the utilization of masses for IoT development and the programming skill requirements on behalf of the masses, an enhanced IoT composition architecture based on DIY Business Process Modeling approach has been presented in this dissertation. Business Process Modeling Notations (BPMN) is a standardized graphical language that has been utilized to gap the bridge between non-technical managers and the technical staff since long. This study utilizes the existing concepts of virtual objects and service-orientation to provide an intuitive DIY IoT composition architecture to enable end-users to visualize IoT service objects as standardized graphical notation and interact with them via simple actions like drag-n-drop and clicks etc. Complete design and implementation details for the BPM based DIY IoT composition architecture have been provided along with the performance evaluation of the major functional units. In order to assess the usability of the proposed architecture from the perspective of multi-domain applicability, two separate use-cases have been developed. The first use-case targets the Industrial Robotics domain which is a growing target for the IoT implementation. A prototype robotic arm has been developed for this purpose. To assess the usability of the proposed architecture, an experimental study has been conducted to allow participant from various age groups and ethnic background to rate the system based on the System Usability Scale. The second use-case is taken from the Smart-Space domain which is another focus of IoT implementations. A prototype scenario of a smart space has been developed to assess the usability of the proposed architecture in the domain. The experimental study allows participants to use the proposed architecture for service composition and BPM based process development for the prototype smart space and then use the System Usability Scale (SUS) to rate the system. As the SUS score only indicates a system's usability from users' perspective based on their subjective ratings, thorough statistical analysis has been conducted on data collected during the experiments for both the use-cases to assess the usability of the proposed architecture from DIY perspective. The SUS scoring and the statistical analysis provided positive support for the claims made in this study.