A Hybrid Simulation Platform for quality-aware evaluation of complex events in an IoT environment

Abstract

Complex Event Processing (CEP) is a successful method to transform simple IoT events created by sensors into meaningful complex business events. To enhance availability, an event fabrication mechanism is integrated within the CEP model, generating synthetic events to offset missing data, resulting in a quality-aware CEP model. In this model, generated complex events are characterized by quality properties, namely completeness and timeliness. To empirically assess the quality of complex events through experimentation, we have developed a hybrid simulation platform. The platform’s dual nature stems from its distinctive approach of simulating sensor behaviors while concurrently running the quality-aware CEP IoT platform. Users can conduct experiments that closely mimic actual operational scenarios and have, in real-time, full visibility and control over all involved aspects, including composite transformations, quality assessment, event fabrication and its effectiveness, and aggregated reports. A representative experiment in an IoT-enabled greenhouse with missing events is presented to demonstrate the usefulness of the platform. The contribution of the hybrid simulation platform is twofold: provide (a) quality assessment of complex events, using two established quality properties for IoT environments with specific computation formulas and (b) a comprehensive testbed covering all aspects of a typical IoT setup for realistic experimentation. Together, these elements provide significant cost–benefit advantages by enabling researchers and practitioners to pre-optimize operational efficiency and decision-making in IoT systems.