ECA Rules for IoT Environment: A Case Study in Safe Design

Abstract

Reactive systems operate in various fields such as, surveillance systems, embedded systems and Internet of things. This paradigm can employ mechanisms of type Event - Condition -Action (ECA). It is a powerful and flexible tool to respond to complex situations. However, the behaviour of a rules based system is difficult to analyse because of the ability of rules to interact with each other. Particularly, in IoT area the rules that govern the relations between sensors and actuators will lead to highly distributed collaborative applications. Runtime coordination and formal analysis becomes a necessity to avoid side effects mainly when applications are critical. This paper presents a case study for safe applications development in IoT. Our approach proposes an extension of ECA semantic by discrete control. We defined a safe interaction properties and developed autonomous controllers that support ECA distribution.