Abstract
Our everyday lives are increasingly pervaded by digital assistants and smart devices forming the Internet of Things (IoT). While user interfaces to directly monitor and control individual IoT devices are becoming more sophisticated and end-user friendly, applications to connect standalone IoT devices and create more complex IoT processes for automating and assisting users with repetitive tasks still require a high level of technical expertise and programming knowledge. Related approaches for process modelling in IoT mostly suggest extensions to complex modelling languages, require high levels of abstraction and technical knowledge, and rely on unintuitive tools. We present a novel approach for end-user oriented-no-code-IoT process modelling using Mixed Reality (MR) technology: HoloFlows. Users are able to explore the IoT environment and model processes among sensors and actuators as first-class citizens by simply “drawing” virtual wires among physical IoT devices. MR technology hereby facilitates the understanding of the physical contexts and relations among the IoT devices and provides a new and more intuitive way of modelling IoT processes. The results of a user study comparing HoloFlows with classical modelling approaches show an increased user experience and decrease in required modelling knowledge and technical expertise to create IoT processes.
Highlights
Smart devices are increasingly pervading our surroundings in the form of interconnected sensors and actuators for home automation, interactive entertainment systems and mobile personal assistants [1]
We let end-users model the same three exemplary Internet of Things (IoT) processes introduced in Sect. 2.1 and “Appendix” and thereby compare IoT process modelling in Mixed Reality (MR) with the two modelling approaches and associated tools introduced in Sect. 2.2: Business Process-oriented Modelling and Flow-based Modelling
We investigated the application of MR technology to support end-users with modelling of basic processes in IoT domains and compared it to traditional desktop-based process modelling approaches
Summary
Smart devices are increasingly pervading our surroundings in the form of interconnected sensors and actuators for home automation, interactive entertainment systems and mobile personal assistants [1]. Different approaches and paradigms were applied to realize this kind of low-code development platforms easing the development of IoT processes Despite it being not their main application purpose, classical business processes were proposed and extended to model and execute processes among the physical and virtual entities of an IoT environment [7]. The underlying modelling concepts and tools require high levels of domain and modelling knowledge as well as an understanding of the abstract concepts used to represent the IoT devices and their relations (e.g. as activities and events in process pools in BPMN 2.0 [9], or as flows among service-based nodes in Node-RED) Both approaches are supported by desktop-based modelling tools featuring classical graphical user interfaces (GUIs) with WIMP interactions [10] and are targeted at IoT experts and process engineers. Being the main actors of processes in the context of this work:
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