A model-driven engineering approach for the service integration of IoT systems

With the development of IoT devices and web services, the objects of the real world are more interconnected, which allows applications to extend their characteristics in different fields, including industrial or home environments, among other possible examples such as health, trade, transport, or agriculture. However, this development highlights the challenge of interoperability, because devices are heterogeneous and use different communication protocols and different data formats. For this reason, we propose a model for point-to-point integration in three-layer IoT applications: (a) hardware, which corresponds to the physical objects (controller, sensor and actuator), (b) communication, which is the bridge that allows the exchange of data between a MQTT queue and REST web services, and (c) integration, which establishes a sequence of transactions to coordinate the components of the system. For this purpose, a metamodel, a graphic editor and a code generator have been developed that allow the developer to design IoT systems formed by heterogeneous components without having in-depth knowledge of every hardware and software platform. In order to validate our proposal, a smart home scenario has been developed, with a series of sensors and actuators that combined show a complex behavior.