Internet of Things Resources Interaction for Service Construction and Delivery

Introduction

Interaction of IoT resources is the important task for the joint service construction and delivery. Different resources should “understand” each other to perform task together that requires the interoperability support between them. The chapter considers different levels of interoperability, discuss the context model creation for the resource, and presents an approach to coalition creation of IoT resources for joint service construction.

There are following levels of interoperability between software resources are distinguished (see Kubicek, Cimander, & Scholl, 2011; Kubicek & Cimander, 2009): technical level, syntactic level, level of semantic interoperability, and level of organizational interoperability (or interoperability of business processes). The technical layer provides connection information transfer between software components (interfaces, communication protocols and the infrastructure necessary for the operation of these protocols). The syntactic layer includes data transfer formats from one program component to another. The semantic level provides an understanding of the meaning of the information exchanged between software components. The organizational level provides an understanding of the business processes arising from the interaction of software components. The first two levels are related to the technical equipment and the basic software of the interacting components, while the third level is the basic one when they interact to harmonize the behavior of the components. The fourth level allows the software components to reconcile business processes between them when performing joint tasks. The third level is the base for support “understanding” of each other by IoT resources. In this regard, this chapter focuses on ensuring the semantic interoperability of IoT resources, which will allow the formation of coalitions for the joint task performing by different IoT resources. The second aspect for coalition creation is the context modelling. The task that should be performed has to be modelled as soon as current situation that is related to this task. Therefore, authors propose to use the context management technology for the context modelling and utilization. In scope of the chapter it is proposed to use ontologies to ensure the semantic interoperability between Internet of Things resources. The ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, using a shared vocabulary to denote the types, properties, and interrelationships of those concepts. Ontology management techniques cover processes of acquisition, storage, updating, and utilization of ontologies.

Special issue ‘‘Intelligent Algorithms and Standards for Interoperability in Internet of Things” of the Future Generation Computer Systems journal (Ahmad, Cuomo, Wu, & Jeon, 2019) consider the intelligent algorithms and standards development for interoperability in Internet of Things. The issue highlights the popularity of the topic and a lot of research done in this area.

The chapter is structured as follows. Background section presents broad definitions and discussions of the semantic interoperability for IoT resources topic. The section semantic interoperability support between interacting resources discusses the proposed the ontology matching method that aimed at “understanding” support between two resources described by ontologies in a shared space. The section context model and coalition creation of internet of things resources proposes the model that is aimed to take into account current situation and utilize it during the interaction process for coalition creation aimed at service construction for task performing in IoT environment. The section multi-level self-organization technique of resources in IoT environment presents a technique for multi-level self-organization support in IoT environment. Solutions and recommendations section discuss questions in dealing with the issues, controversies, or problems presented in the preceding section. The section future research directions discuss the future work in the area of personalization. Conclusion summarize the chapter.