Self-Organizing Software Models for the Internet of Things

TL;DR

This paper introduces self-organizing software models for IoT systems, enabling decentralized emergence of system behavior during operation to handle increasing complexity with minimal human intervention.

Contribution

It presents a novel paradigm for IoT software systems that self-organize and emerge autonomously, reducing manual management and enhancing scalability.

Findings

Defines self-organizing software models for IoT

Discusses research challenges and future directions

Highlights potential for autonomous IoT system management

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) envisions the integration of physical objects into software systems for automating crucial aspects of our lives, such as healthcare, security, agriculture, and city management. Although the vision is promising, with the rapid advancement of hardware and communication technologies, IoT systems are becoming increasingly dynamic, large, and complex to the extent that manual management becomes infeasible. Thus, it is of paramount importance to provide software engineering foundations for constructing autonomic IoT systems. In this paper, we introduce a novel paradigm referred to as self-organizing software models in which IoT software systems are not explicitly programmed, but emerge in a decentralized manner during system operation, with minimal or without human intervention. We particularly present an overview of these models by including their definition, motivation, research challenges, and potential directions.