Enabling Model-Driven Software Development Tools for the Internet of Things

Abstract

The heterogeneity and complexity of Internet of Things (IoT) applications present new challenges to the software development process. Model-Driven Software Development (MDSD) is increasingly being recognized as a key paradigm in tackling many of these challenges, as evident by the emergence of a significant number of MDSD frameworks targeting IoT in the past couple of years. At the heart of IoT applications are embedded and realtime systems, a domain where model-driven development is well-established and many existing tools have a proven track record. Unfortunately, only a handful of these tools support out-of-the-box integration with the IoT. In this work, we discuss the different design and implementation decisions for enabling existing actor-oriented MDSD tools for the IoT. Moreover, we propose an integration approach based on the use of proxy actors and system interfaces. The approach offers seamless and flexible integration of external IoT devices into the user's model. We implement and evaluate our approach using the MDSD tool Papyrus for Realtime as a testbed.