Software Agents Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Advancements on microelectromechanical systems, embedded technologies, and wireless communications have recently enabled the evolution of conventional everyday things in enhanced entities, commonly defined Smart Objects (SOs). Their continuous and widespread diffusion, along with an increasing and pervasive connectivity, is enabling unforeseen interactions with conventional computing systems, places, animals and humans, thus fading the boundary between physical and digital worlds. The Internet of Things (IoT) term just refers to such futuristic scenario, namely a loosely coupled, decentralized and dynamic ecosystem in which billions (even trillions) of self-steering SOs are globally interconnected becoming active participants in business, logistics, information and social processes. Indeed, SOs are able to provide highly pervasive cyberphysical services to both humans and machines thanks to their communication, sensing, actuation, and embedded processing capabilities. Nowadays, the systemic revolution that can be led through the complete realization of the IoT vision is just at its dawn. As matter of facts, whereas new IoT devices and systems have been already developed, they often result in poorly interoperating "Intra-nets of things", mainly due to the heterogeneity featuring IoT building blocks and the lack of standards. Thus, the development of massive scaled (the total number of "things" is forecasted to reach 20.4 billion in 2020) and actually interoperable IoT systems is a challenging task, featured by several requirements and novel, even unsurveyed, issues.
In this context, a multidisciplinary and systematic development approach is necessary, so to involve different fields of expertise for coping with the cyberphysical nature of IoT ecosystem. Henceforth, full-fledged IoT methodologies are gaining traction, aiming at systematically supporting all development phases, addressing mentioned issues, and reducing time-to-market, efforts and probability of failure. In such a scenario, this Thesis proposes an application domain-neutral, full-fledged agent-based development methodology able to support the main engineering phases of IoT ecosystems. The definition of such systematic approach resulted in ACOSO-Meth (Agent-based COoperating Smart Objects Methodology), which is the major contribution of this thesis along with other interesting research efforts supporting (i.e., a multi-technology and multiprotocol smartphone-based IoT gateway) and extending (i.e., a full-fledged approach to the IoT services modeling according to their opportunistic properties) the main proposal. Finally, to provide validation and performance evaluation of the proposed ACOSO-Meth approach, four use cases (related to different application contexts such as a smart university campus, a smart digital library, a smart city and a smart workshop) have been developed. These research prototypes showed the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach and improved their respective state-of-the-art.