MontiThings: Model-Driven Development and Deployment of Reliable IoT Applications

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) applications are exposed to harsh conditions due to factors such as device failure, network problems, or implausible sensor values. We investigate how the inherent encapsulation of component and connector (C&C) architectures can be used to develop and deploy reliable IoT applications. Existing C&C languages for the development of IoT applications mainly focus on the description of architectures and the distribution of components to IoT devices. Furthermore, related approaches often pollute the models with low-level implementation details, tying the models to a particular platform and making them harder to understand. In this paper, we introduce MontiThings, a C&C language offering automatic error handling capabilities and a clear separation between business logic and implementation details. The error-handling methods presented in this paper can make C&C-based IoT applications more reliable without cluttering the business logic with error-handling code that is time-consuming to develop and makes the models hard to understand, especially for non-experts.