Towards the Adoption of OMG Standards in the Development of SOA-Based IoT Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces IoTDraw, an OMG-compliant executable modeling language designed to improve the development and analysis of SOA-based IoT systems by addressing heterogeneity and interoperability challenges.

Contribution

It presents IoTDraw, a novel executable modeling language that fully supports OMG standards for designing and simulating SOA-based IoT applications.

Findings

IoTDraw enables model execution and analysis.

Supports interoperability with OMG standards.

Addresses heterogeneity in IoT systems.

Abstract

A common feature of the Internet of Things (IoT) is the high heterogeneity, regarding network protocols, data formats, hardware and software platforms. Aiming to deal with such a degree of heterogeneity, several frameworks have applied the Model-Driven Development (MDD) to build IoT applications. On the software architecture viewpoint, the literature has shown that the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a promising style to address the interoperability of entities composing these solutions. Some features of IoT make it challenging to analyze the impact of design decisions on the SOA-based IoT applications behavior. Thus, it is a key requirement to simulate the model to verify whether the system performs as expected before its implementation. Although the literature has identified that the SOA style is suitable for addressing the interoperability, existing modelling languages do not consider SOA elements as first-class citizens when designing IoT applications. Furthermore, although existing MDD frameworks provide modeling languages comprising well-defined syntax, they lack execution semantics, thus, are not suitable for model execution and analysis. This work aims at addressing these issues by introducing IoTDraw. The framework provides a fully OMG-compliant executable modeling language for SOA-based IoT systems; thus, its specifications can be implemented by any tool implementing OMG standards.