Towards a Uniform Ontology-Driven Approach for Modeling, Checking and Executing WSANs

Abstract

Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) refer to a group of sensors and actuators linked by wireless medium to perform distributed sensing and acting tasks. Being reactive systems, quite often WSANs are programmed by Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rule-based languages. Because of potential interactions among the rules themselves and theirsurprising effects on the system behaviour, it is quite difficult to ensure a safe behaviour of a WSAN at design time. This paper proposes a semantic-driven approach for modeling, checking and executing ECA rule-based WSANs. The approach can be considered uniform since any of the previous phases works on a common ontology-based WSAN model integrating and linking three different system views: the static one (i.e., sensor and actuator types in the WSAN, description of its environment, deployment information etc.), the dynamic one (i.e., a set of ECA rules programming the given WSAN) and the behavioural one (i.e., a finite state machine (FSM)-based representation of the WSAN behaviour w.r.t. the given dynamics). We show how the proposed approach provides an agile verification of system properties involving (and also mixing) static, dynamic and behavioural concepts. In particular, with regard to the behavioural view, we will focus on properties like consistency, correctness and termination. In order to better explain our approach, we present a home automation case study.